Starfall
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, past HPGW. The aftermath of a Dark hex dissolves Harry's marriage to Ginny, and sends Harry down into a spiral of depression. To console himself, he keeps a private journal in the persona of Ethan Starfall, normal wizard with a big family. Draco sends a desperate letter asking for help with Scorpius; Harry finds it, and responds as Ethan. Perhaps he shouldn't have.
1. The News

**Title: **Starfall

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, past Draco/Astoria, Ron/Hermione

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Angst, manipulation

**Summary: **When the truth about a seemingly minor Dark hex Harry has suffered leads to the dissolution of his marriage with Ginny, Harry spins into a downward spiral. His private consolation is creating a fantasy life for himself in his journal as Ethan Starfall, a normal wizard with a big family. When he receives a random owl Draco Malfoy has cast into the void as a plea for help with his son Scorpius, Harry replies—as Ethan. There's no reason, he thinks, for an epistolary friendship with Draco to go further. But Draco might have different ideas about that.

**Author's Note: **This is likely to be a long story, updated fairly regularly. It is, however, very angsty.

**Starfall**

_Chapter One—The News_

"Auror Potter."

Harry stood up at once when he saw the mediwitch's face. He had come to St. Mungo's for nothing more than a routine examination, the sort all the Aurors had to have after being hit with Dark spells in the course of a case. Harry had encountered thirteen Dark spells this time, although one of those had been the Imperius Curse and he'd shrugged it off with ease, and the rest had all caused momentary pain or just scrapes.

He'd thought. But the mediwitch was pale and clutching at the door, her body taut, as if she couldn't come further into the room.

"What is it?" Harry asked gently. He Summoned a chair over and unlocked her frozen hand, helping her sit down. He also Summoned a glass and conjured water to pour into it. "Did someone threaten you because they wanted to see my medical results?" That had happened before, with some of the crazier fans.

The mediwitch sipped from the glass and seemed to grow calmer. "No," she said. "It's just…one of the hexes you were hit with. Did it hit you near your groin?"

Harry blinked. "Yes, actually. But I didn't have any bruises or blood there, and everything else—everything else was normal the evening after that." Now he was the one blushing, as though to make up for the mediwitch's pallor. He had never been with anyone but Ginny. He didn't like discussing sex with anyone else, either.

The mediwitch closed her eyes. "I hate this," she breathed. "I'm new, and so I get all the hard work. Like telling you what that hex really does."

"What's your name?" Harry asked softly, taking one of her hands. It brought her out of her trance enough to look up at him, and it calmed some of Harry's racing heartbeat, too. At least he knew that he always felt better when he helped someone. "Why do they always assign you to do this?'

"Forsythia Yellowborn." Yellowborn gave him a tentative smile. "And I told you. I'm the newest one. No one else wants to do it, so…"

"That's still terrible of them," Harry said firmly. "An experienced Healer should do it because they can spare people and themselves more pain." He flashed her a smile. "I'm sure that the news isn't all that bad, is it?" Yellowborn's nervousness was probably making it look worse than it really was.

Unexpectedly, Yellowborn's eyes filled with tears, and she glanced away from him. "I'm sorry, but it is," she whispered. "The hex—if it had hit elsewhere it would probably only have affected you minimally. But it interacted with the other Dark magic that you had on you, and that and the place it hit you—" She steeled herself one more time, then blurted out, "It acts like an infertility hex, Auror Potter."

Harry stood still. He thought that his hand in Yellowborn's hand had gone limp and his ears were ringing, but at least his sight wasn't blinded with tears, and that was the important thing right now.

_Infertility_.

He had briefly studied infertility hexes in Auror training, as he had all sorts of other curses. They were the sort of curse that had been more popular in the past than in the present. Pure-blood wizards liked to cast them on their enemies. Depriving them of a family and the continuation of their bloodline had once been seen as the best kind of revenge.

Harry's thoughts said that, dimly, while most of his body said that he was falling down a long tunnel with no end in sight.

"And it can't be healed?" he whispered. "Or reversed?"

"Maybe it could have been," Yellowborn said, wiping away what looked like tears. "But only with Healing there in the first minute or so after the hex." She looked at him and swallowed. "I'm sorry, they told me not to say that. But it's the truth, and I think you deserve the truth."

"But why—so many hexes can be reversed," said Harry, even as he remembered the Auror training that said the old curses pure-bloods cast on each other couldn't be, and that was one reason they were so devastating. "Why not this one?"

Yellowborn closed her eyes. "Because it resulted from an interaction of the Dark magic that you'd already suffered in the battle with that hex. It wasn't just a single spell. It was a whole combination of them. To reverse it, we would have to cast a lot of other magic on you, magic that replicated the effects of those curses, and then we'd have to know exactly what hex it was." She looked at him. "I don't think you know."

Harry shook his head dazedly. He had been in the midst of battle-fury, and he had had a lot of opponents. The hex had been non-verbal and could have come from any of them. They'd already interrogated the prisoners and proved that most of them didn't remember which spells they had used. It was like that in the midst of a duel, sometimes, and battle was usually worse.

"I'm sorry," said Yellowborn again, sounding desperate. "This was just such bad luck. The person who cast the hex didn't mean for it—they didn't try to cast an infertility curse. That's just what it happened. It was bad luck."

_Just like everything else in my life, _Harry thought, rubbing his face with one hand, and then dropped it and managed a smile when he saw how anxiously Yellowborn was looking at him. "No, it's okay," he said as softly as he could. "I know you couldn't do more than you have, and it wasn't fair to make you come to me and break the news. I do appreciate that you found the courage to do it anyway."

Yellowborn bit her lip and lowered her eyes. "I hope you find some other way to reverse this," she said. "We can't do it here, but maybe somewhere else can. There are experimental Healers, different techniques, you know."

In different circumstances, Harry would have laughed. He had never heard anyone at St. Mungo's say anything good about experimental Healers and different techniques that operated outside their sphere of influence.

But it was these circumstances. And Harry still felt as though the ground was unstable under his feet, as though he was spinning down a tunnel and didn't know when he would stop falling.

"Auror Potter? Are you all right?"

_No. I'm not going to be all right again. _All Harry could think about was the way Ginny had said they might start a family soon, and how he wanted to rage and strike out at the universe for what it had done to him. All he _wanted _was a family, blood relations, people who could give him what he'd grown up without, and the universe had to take that away just like it had taken away his parents and his godfather and his innocence and his ability to live a normal fucking life.

But showing that to Yellowborn wouldn't be fair. Harry had to go home and tell Ginny; she was the only one who could properly share his grief. For now, he forced a smile and looked up.

"I will be."

* * *

Ginny couldn't stop crying.

Harry sat beside her at the kitchen table with his arm around her, in silence. He was glad now that he'd first got the news in front of Yellowborn, someone he had to be strong for, and then he could go home and be strong right away for Ginny. He still had this hopeless little drum beating at the back of his mind, but at least it wasn't going to overpower him right now.

"She said there was nothing they could do to reverse it?" Ginny was whispering. It sounded as though the sobs had torn her throat. Harry tightened his arm hard again and wished this hadn't happened, again, for the ten thousandth time. He knew what family meant to Ginny.

"No," said Harry. "They did talk to the wizards we captured who were flinging all those curses at us, and they didn't know who had cast it, either. One of them could have, and not remembered it. Or it could have been one of the ones who got away."

"Then the Auror Department needs to send people after the ones who escaped right away!" Ginny twisted around and leaned against him. "They should do that anyway. What if they come back and hurt you?"

Harry sighed and lowered his head so his nose brushed the nape of her neck. She smelled soft and clean and easy to love. "I know. But we don't know their names. We got their leaders, but even they don't know the names of everyone who was working with them. They operate in little groups like that, interconnected but hidden, so no one can betray all their secrets if they get captured."

Ginny's hands wrapped around his upper arms and squeezed. "But there's still a chance," she said. "That it could be reversed. If you capture the right people and figure out the right sequence of spells?"

Harry hesitated, but her eyes shone at him. The hope was too precious. He couldn't bring himself to shoot it down. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "Even though it would take a long time."

"I don't care." Ginny's head leaned more firmly against his chest. "I want to have children, _your _children. Do what you can to find them."

Harry said nothing, embracing her and bowing his head again, but he didn't think that he could make promises. She seemed to take his hug as an implicit promise in and of itself, and for now, that was all it could be.

* * *

"I know how much this news means to you." Kingsley spoke the words with his eyes fixed on the pile of parchment at the front of his desk. "But Harry, we can't put all our manpower into this single case. And I don't want you taking as many risks as Ron said you had been in your pursuit of these wizards." He raised his eyes at last, and glanced at Harry's bandaged hand. "Ron also said that you spent more time in St. Mungo's last week than this report shows."

Harry's face burned, and he covered as best as he could with an awkward clearing of his throat. "Well, I mean—I didn't think I should have the Ministry cover my medical expenses when it was my own stupid fault I ran into that trap."

"I see." Kingsley folded his hands with the same slow care. "I understand that the loss of your ability to have children has hurt you deeply."

Harry nodded and fastened his own gaze on one of the paperweights Kingsley kept on his desk, which had been a gift from Harry and Ron after the first year they had worked together as Auror partners and Kingsley had backed them up on some of their unpopular findings about the links between Ministry officials and Dark wizards. "The mediwitch who talked to me about it said maybe the spell could be reversed if I caught the wizard who had cast the spell and we could understand what it was and how it interacted with the other hexes on my body."

"Yellowborn is the mediwitch you're talking about?" Kingsley picked up a folder from behind the desk.

Harry stared at him in alarm. "Yeah. What is it? Is she all right?" He started to stand, worried she might have got in trouble with her superiors for telling him the truth.

"She is," said Kingsley. "But this is another report from her, and I think you should read it in its entirety." He handed it across the desk, then turned and began busily to clear some of the parchment from the tallest pile he had.

Harry opened the folder with a clanging sense of doom in the back of his head. He was breathing faster than he should, he realized. He shut his eyes and counted backwards to ten, with a pause of seconds between each number, before he continued.

_Dear Auror Potter, _it began. _I'm sorry, but I was wrong about us only needing to know the hex and how it interacted with the other Dark magic in your body. I didn't realize then that there was a time limit. We might have been able to do something if we had known right away—although even then it's hard to be sure—but too much time has passed now. The traces of magic on your body have faded away so we can't cast the spells on the exact areas anymore. We didn't keep detailed records because we were just interested in healing their effects, not pinpointing exactly where they struck. I'm sorry._

There were more documents, photographs and explanations of some of the curses Harry had been hit with that day, but Harry didn't have the heart to read them. He laid the folder down on the desk.

Then he picked it up again. If he was going to kill the hope he had inadvertently given Ginny, he would take the proof that the hope was dead with him.

"Can I go home now, sir?" he asked, without glancing at Kingsley. He had to be alone for a few minutes. Just a few minutes, in the lift or at home when he got there. Ginny might not even be there right now. Her last practice had gone badly, and the coach had summoned the team together to work out why.

"Yes, Harry."

Kingsley's voice was deep with what Harry thought was probably compassion, but he would do something unforgivable if he stayed to hear it right now. He nodded back, keeping his eyes shut, and fled from the room. It was a good thing he knew the corridors of the Ministry so well.

* * *

Ginny didn't cry this time. She simply sat there with her hands pressed into her eyes and the folder on her lap. Harry sat with his arm around her shoulders again. They were on the couch in the drawing room this time, and there were no sobs, no tears.

It was too dry for that, too hard, like the bones of Harry's arm felt, like the bones of Ginny's shoulder blades felt.

Ginny finally leaned against him, and began to weep again. This time, it was the soft sound of giving up. Harry rested his chin on the top of her head and went reeling into misery himself.

What was it going to _mean, _that they couldn't have children? It wasn't just that Molly wanted grandkids and Ginny had always grown up wanting them and assuming she would have her own sons and daughters someday. Harry wanted them, too, wanted them _desperately. _It would be like having his parents back again. Real people he was blood-related to. People he could love and protect and adore. He wouldn't have been able to protect his parents if they were still around, but this just made that all the more special. His parents' shades had walked with him when he went to his death—what he'd thought would be his death—in the Forbidden Forest. He wanted to walk beside someone someday and be proud that he was there for them and protecting them and helping them.

_It isn't over forever. You know Ron and Hermione would let you play with their own kids, and help them, and teach them Defense, and all sorts of other things. And you still have Teddy and Victoire and Dominique and any other Weasley kids._

But it wasn't the same—the way, Harry knew as her sobs dried on his shoulder, that it wouldn't be the same for Ginny. Children of his _own _family. That was what he wanted. He loved Teddy, he would love being an uncle to Ron and Hermione's children, but he also wanted children of his own blood. He'd never had a family, other than maybe Dudley at the very end, and he hadn't heard from Dudley and Aunt Petunia at all since the war. He wanted…

He wanted something he was never going to have.

"Harry?"

Harry gently smoothed Ginny's hair back from her forehead. "Are you okay?" he asked, even though that was a stupid question. She'd just spent almost an hour crying. Of course she wasn't okay.

"I'm okay." Ginny's hand tightened in his, and she lifted her head. "Are _you_?"

"Not the best, but I reckon I'll survive." Harry kissed her temple. Her eyes were hollow. He reckoned his must look the same way, though. "Do you want something to eat? Something to drink?" She'd cried so much that he thought she might actually have dehydrated herself, although admittedly he didn't know much about that.

"Some tea?" Ginny asked with a wistful little smile, and Harry nodded, detached himself form her, and went to make it. The motions of his wand as he boiled the water and fetched the tea itself were soothing.

Until he started thinking that he would never teach them to someone else, someone smaller than he was, with red or black hair and maybe his mum's eyes…

Harry shook his head violently. He wasn't the only one affected by this. They would get through it. Honestly, he was at his best when he had someone else to care for, the way he'd had to watch over Yellowborn and avoid blaming her when she first announced the news to him, and the way he had Ginny now. He was going to be strong. He wasn't going to collapse. This was just the way it was, and the way it would have to be.

He didn't intend to die of the news, or his grief. He would make it in time. It would just be harder than he had thought it would be at first, dealing with the death of all those little dreams. But he would have someone by his side when he did it.

* * *

"There's nothing I can find, Harry." Hermione sounded as though she was talking at a funeral. "Even the books on modified infertility curses basically say that there's no way to reverse one once it's cast."

"I knew that," Harry told his cup of tea, and leaned back in the wooden chair at Hermione's kitchen table. Just because he liked to care for other people didn't mean that he didn't appreciate them taking care of him, too. "But thank you for researching anyway."

"I want you to know that you're _always _welcome over here, to play with our kids," said Ron vehemently, getting up and coming around the table as if he thought Harry might challenge him on that. "I mean, when we have them."

Harry gave him a tired smile and slapped his best friend's arm. "I know."

Ron wavered and fidgeted one more moment, and then blurted out, "Mate, if it was something _I _did, if I didn't watch out, if I wasn't careful enough—"

Harry cut Ron off with a roll of his eyes that must have been eloquent, because he heard Hermione snicker. "Now who's the one who needs that speech of yours on making everything your fault?" Harry asked rhetorically, shaking his head. "_No, _Ron. We don't even know for sure who cast the spell or when it landed during the battle. It could have been because I wasn't watching or someone got lucky. It could have been one of the wizards we captured or one who got away. No one knows. And I'm not going to have you blaming yourself for something that could have been my fault as much as yours."

"Right," said Ron after a second, and smiled at him. "I have to say, you're dealing really well with all this, mate."

Harry smiled back. It wasn't like anyone was inside his head to feel the despair and hear the screaming nightmares that mostly didn't happen at night. "I know that I'm still alive. And I really appreciate you letting me—knowing I can be part of your kids' lives." He looked across the table at Hermione.

"You're going to be godfather to _all _of them," said Hermione fiercely. Then she paused. "That is, the two we're going to have."

"Hermione, you know Mum wants more than two," said Ron, in the tone that told Harry this was an old battle.

"But _I _don't," said Hermione, and she and Ron disappeared into the middle of the mutual bickering that, at least since they had got married, marked how strong their relationship actually was with each other, and which Harry would have been alarmed to find had stopped.

Harry leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He would survive this, with the support of his friends and his family. With his job. With people to take care of. With the promise of children in the future.

The despair that shrieked in the back of his mind would just have to suck it up.

_And the despair that's in Ginny's eyes?_

Harry shook his head briskly. He couldn't think about that right now. He had to think about what was in front of him, the hope instead of the despair. He wouldn't give up on his life even if he was missing the thing he had most wanted. He used to think when he was at the Dursleys' that nothing would ever change and nothing would ever let him get out of there. He'd been wrong then, and _since _then, he had tried to remember the incredible change that had come over his life and how another one might happen any second.

* * *

He managed to hang onto that hope until he got home, and realized Ginny was nowhere in the house. "Gin?" Harry called uneasily, walking into the kitchen, where she usually would have been making dinner by now. It was her turn to cook, and she hadn't said anything about an extra practice or meeting with the team this afternoon.

Then he saw a note in the middle of the table, and relaxed. It was probably telling him that she had been called to one of those unpredictable meetings or practices after all.

He stepped towards it, and then paused. The clock that Ginny had bought years ago, in the shape of an owl that would flutter and hoot when the hour struck, was missing from above the mantel.

Harry swallowed, and picked up the note.

_Dear Harry,_

_I don't want you to worry. I'm over at Mum's for the night. I just wanted some space and time to think about it. I'll come back tomorrow. Love, Ginny._

Harry lowered the note carefully to the table, the way he would put a sleeping baby to rest. His heart was beating too fast, and for no reason. Ginny had only gone overnight. It wasn't as though she was abandoning him.

But it felt like the beginning of the end.


	2. Slow Motion

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Slow Motion_

"I don't know what to do."

Harry hesitated, rather than walking right into the kitchen, the way he had planned to do when he realized that Ginny had come back from the Burrow. From the sound of things, she was talking to someone. It was probably someone from the Harpies. Just like Harry had Ron and Hermione, those were her friends, the ones she confided in.

Harry edged away from the kitchen. He didn't want to overhear things like this, even accidentally. He and Ginny trusted each other too much for that.

"I want you to follow your heart," the other person responded, and Harry froze again. That was Molly, not someone from the team. "It's always the best guide you can have." A soft silence; Harry could easily picture Molly squeezing Ginny's hand, the way she had done for Harry so many times. "You're a Gryffindor, you should know that."

Ginny laughed, a watery sound. "But what if my heart is telling me two different things? What if I want Harry and I want children?"

"Then the best thing you can do is be honest with both him and yourself, as soon as you can," Molly said firmly.

Harry slipped away then. He shouldn't have stayed as long as he did. He wasn't entitled to overhear what went on between a mother and a daughter.

And he didn't want to have heard what he did. When he got up to their bedroom, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes in case Ginny came in and wondered what he was doing there, but his heartbeat wouldn't shut up and let him relax.

Of course he knew that Ginny could still have children. The curse only affected him, and those experimental Healers he had visited, although they couldn't recreate the circumstances that had made him infertile or reverse the hex, had been able to reassure him that he hadn't passed on his infertility to Ginny by sleeping with her.

He had just never considered that she might choose to leave him.

_Maybe that wasn't what that was about. Maybe you're paranoid. Maybe you shouldn't be thinking so hard about something you were eavesdropping on anyway. Aunt Petunia always said that you never overheard anything good about yourself when you were eavesdropping, anyway._

Harry had to snort at that, because his life had got pretty low if he was reduced to thinking of something _Aunt Petunia _had said as advice.

But his head continued to reel, and when he eventually heard the flash and flare of the fire that marked Molly's departure, he didn't go down and talk to Ginny the way he half-wanted to. She wasn't the only one with conflicting desires. He fell asleep with his cheek pillowed on his hand instead, and only opened his eyes when he felt her fingers touch his hair.

"Harry?" Ginny's voice had a soft little whistle in it, the way he had heard before, but only when she was sick. Harry, still yawning, rolled over and took her hand.

"Yeah?" His voice was soft, too. That seemed to help Ginny. She looked off to the side for a second, took a deep breath, and met his eyes again.

"I thought of something that could help us have children," she said. "It would be hard for both of us, but I think it would be the best solution, in the end." Her voice was rushing along like a stream by the time she reached the end of the sentence, and her hand tightened on his in a way that made Harry gently force open her fingers and run his over them to soothe her.

"You know I would do anything," he said quietly. "You know I want children. I want to raise them and teach them and protect them and—I just want _family _again, you know? I can't know my parents, so I wanted to know my kids."

Ginny was looking down at the bedspread, but Harry saw her wince. From that, he knew what would come out of her mouth, although he didn't say anything. Let her get through it, say what she needed to say.

"They wouldn't be _your _kids, exactly," said Ginny. "I mean, they would be mine. And yours, because you would help raise them. I was thinking that I could—there are people who could help. People who wouldn't mind sleeping with me to give me…" Her face trailed off. She was as red as Harry thought he must have been when he was speaking to Yellowborn. They just didn't invite other people into their sex lives.

Harry closed his eyes. "And could you be absolutely sure that someone else you wanted to sleep with wouldn't insist on being part of the kids' lives?" he asked, voice tight. "That he wouldn't want to be a father to his children? Because I would, if I was still capable."

"Well, no," said Ginny, in such a reluctant voice that Harry thought she probably had considered that and hadn't been able to think of someone she would want to sleep with but who wouldn't want contact with the kids. "But that doesn't mean you couldn't _both _be fathers. You would be the father in the most important ways—I think. I mean. I think I could convince him that he—that it was okay—"

"No," Harry said softly.

Ginny looked at him with anxious eyes. "You think I couldn't convince him? But I wasn't thinking of asking him to give up all rights to the kids. Or not saying they're his. I was just going to ask him not to go around saying or acting like he's their _only _father."

Harry looked away from her. "Maybe it's selfish, but if it was okay with me to just have adopted children, then I'd already have Teddy and any kids Ron and Hermione have," he whispered. "I want children of my _own _blood, Ginny, without another bloke who could say that he's more their father than I am." He hesitated, then blurted out the next idea that had arisen in his mind. "I know Muggle women get donations. They don't have to know who the father is. The father doesn't have to sleep with the woman or have any idea the kid is his."

"Donations of _what_?" Ginny asked, but she figured it out before Harry could say anything. "Harry, no, that's _revolting_."

"How?" Harry demanded, sitting up and turning around. "I mean, I don't think it would work, because I still want kids of my own, but that would solve the problem of the kids' father wanting to step in and interfere." He grimaced. He could imagine little worse than a conflict between two fathers over whether it was the right thing for a kid to be punished, or to start flying early, or to visit the Muggle world. He didn't ever want to subject children to that kind of thing. At least, if he played with Teddy or Ron and Hermione's kids, they would always know that Andromeda or Ron and Hermione were the ones who were really raising them.

"It's revolting," Ginny repeated, and wrapped her arms around herself. "I want to make love with someone, and look in his face, and know that his children are growing inside me."

Harry winced, feeling as though someone had pinched all the nerves in his arms at once. "Well, that's nice, but you can't do it with me anymore," he snapped, and looked away.

"If you would be—if you would think about it," Ginny began, evidently deciding against using some word that might be "reasonable." If that was the word, Harry was glad she'd changed her mind.

"I don't want kids of someone else's blood," Harry whispered. "I don't want you to make love with someone else." He glanced sideways at Ginny. "And you already have someone in mind, don't you?"

Ginny flushed redder than he'd ever seen her go. "So what if I do? At least I'm trying to _solve _the problem!"

"Well, I told you about the Muggle solution," Harry snapped. "Anyone can go there! It's not like that—at least that way, there'd be no other father interfering. They wouldn't even know who you were or that your children were being born."

"That's revolting," Ginny whispered again. "That's the really revolting part, that they would never know. And what if I couldn't find a wizard who'd—donated?"

"I assume that most people who do donate are Muggles," said Harry. He couldn't understand what she was on about. "Unless there's some wizards living in the Muggle world who do. Why is that important?"

"If we had a child who wasn't magical because the father was Muggle," Ginny said, "how would you feel?"

"I would love a child who was a Squib!" Harry had to turn around and stare at the wall. He took a deep breath. "I had a dream last year that we had a son who was a Squib. It didn't matter. It would _never _matter. Not to me."

"If it was a child of your own blood," said Ginny. "But what if it wasn't? Would you really be able to look at a child who wasn't of your own blood and never feel resentment towards him or her if it turned out they didn't have magic?"

"And you think I would never resent a child who wasn't of my own blood if you conceived them with someone else?" At least Harry was calm enough that he didn't want to stomp around the room and fling things at the thought of his wife in bed with someone else. "Besides, what if _they _were a Squib? There's a lot of pure-blood inbreeding."

"Not in the Weasley family!"

"You interbred with the pure-blood families just like everyone else!" Harry swung around and glared at her. "And didn't your mum have a second cousin who was an accountant or something?"

"I can't—how could you fling that back in my face?" Ginny was shivering, facing away from him. "You can't understand how afraid I am to go into this Muggle bank and do something with somebody's—things, but you can tell me that it would be my fault if I made love with someone else and we had a Squib child?"

"You were the one who was afraid that we would have a Squib if the father was a Muggle!" Harry raked his fingers down through his hair. Sometimes the gesture soothed him, because it reminded him of all the times in the past when he'd done that and had problems and managed to overcome them, but it wasn't working this time. "Listen, Ginny, it's too soon to be talking about this, all right? I still need time to absorb that I won't ever have kids."

"I want them," said Ginny quietly, with dignity. She stood up and looked him in the eye. "I want them _soon_. And if you can just see things my way, then you'll have them. With me. They just won't be half yours."

Harry closed his eyes. He wondered if he was being selfish, if he was being unreasonable. Maybe it was silly to think that whoever Ginny slept with would want to be in the kids' lives every second, or that they would be confused about who their real father was. Maybe it was worst of all to deprive Ginny of her chance to have children.

"I always wanted to have kids who were mine by blood," he whispered. "There was none of my family left alive. I want them to _be alive_."

"I know," said Ginny. "Harry, I know. But adopted kids are the only way that you'll ever have them now." Harry winced, but he'd been telling himself harsher things for the past week, trying to get used to the facts. "I just thought—you love me so much. I _know _you do. Couldn't you love my children, too?"

"Why can't we both adopt?" Harry whispered. "Why can't we adopt one of those children we're hearing about now who lost their families recently because their parents died in the war and their grandparents adopted them, but their grandparents are dying now?"

"Because I want children of my own!"

Harry looked at her, and spread his hands. "And so do I."

Ginny closed her eyes, then uttered a quiet laugh that would have cheered Harry up if it was less soaked in despair. "Yes, that was sort of stupid of me, wasn't it?"

"Not stupid," said Harry. He licked his lips and found them coated with a dry saliva that felt like fuzz. "I think that we're both having a hard time dealing with it. I know I am. And we're not thinking about things, and we're not thinking about consequences. I'm sorry."

Ginny reached out and took his hand. Her hold was fragile, and so was her smile; it faded a few minutes after she had taken his hand. Harry waited. He thought things were better than if they were screaming at each other, but—he didn't think Ginny had completely changed her mind and decided not to sleep with someone else to have children.

"I really want kids," Ginny whispered. "I've been thinking about it for a while, deciding whether I would leave the Harpies at the end of next season, or whether I would play for a while when I was pregnant. I can't give up that dream."

"And I'm sorry," Harry said, his voice stiffening in spite of himself, "but I really don't want you sleeping with someone else to get pregnant."

Ginny stared at him. "You couldn't learn to love—my kids? You love me, Harry. I assume you would love my children."

Harry shut his eyes, exhausted. "You know what I think about that already. If we weren't married and you had children, I would be happy to be an uncle to them. But Ginny, I'm in love with you. I think adopting children together is our best bet. You want to begin looking for them? I don't mind a boy or a girl first. We can think about it."

"I just want them to be of my blood so much," Ginny whispered. She hesitated, and then added, "And I can still do that."

Harry heard the very slight emphasis on the word _I_, but he didn't want to acknowledge it. It hurt too much. He turned his head away, and dropped her hand.

"Can't you compromise a little?" Ginny was stroking the bed near his fingers, without quite touching him. "Meet me in the middle?"

"How can I do that, when you want to have children with someone else?" Harry opened his eyes and blinked at the window. He'd thought he'd slept until the evening, but no, the light of late summer afternoon was still coming through it. It was strange, and made him feel stranger.

"I mean that _one _of us can have children," said Ginny. "And that means that one of us should be able to. We can't just go off and adopt a child when we could—we could be depriving a couple where neither of them can have children from having one."

Harry rubbed his eyes with one hand. "I don't think there are many couples like that," he muttered. "One of them might be infertile, but the other partner accepts it and they both adopt a child together." He knew that Muggles had different ways of handling it, but he wasn't going to discuss that, not when Ginny was so revolted by the one situation that Harry knew anything about in detail.

"You could learn to love a child who was related to me."

Harry shook his head. "I can't compromise on this, Ginny. Maybe if it was the Muggle way, then I could, but I can't _stand _the thought of you sleeping with someone else."

Ginny closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her face was still and cold. "Well, you'll have to. Because I want a baby, and this is the only way to have one."

"_Not _the only way—"

"The only way I'll accept."

Harry stared at her. He thought now that the note she had left him the other night _had _been the beginning of the end, but not in a way that he'd anticipated. Or maybe the conversation with Molly telling Ginny to follow her heart had begun it, and Ginny had decided that she wanted children more than she wanted her marriage.

"What will happen if I go out today and find someone to give me children?" Ginny asked, with a bright, false tone to her voice that Harry knew well. It was the one she used when she was hoping that he would contradict her.

But Harry only shook his head. He didn't have the words. He had tumult, and nothing else, spilling up behind his eyes and staying there. He bowed his head and turned his back on Ginny.

He heard her short gasp, the sign of such hurt as he'd only caused her a few times since they got married. He thought he could repair everything now if he turned and took her in his arms. That was what he had done the other times. He and Ginny both had tempers, but they did love each other. Harry could feel the love beating in him like another heart, the same love that didn't want Ginny to sleep with someone else. He would have let her go and do it if he didn't care.

_Or if you were unselfish enough to let her follow her desires._

Harry hunched his shoulders. And maybe he could have been that way, but this was so _sudden_. He and Ginny could wait, couldn't they? She didn't have to have a baby right away. He thought she was just running off without thinking because the news of Harry's infertility had been so sudden, too. Harry wanted time to come to terms with it. He thought she should have that, too.

He turned around. Maybe he had found the words that would make her listen to him. "Can we wait a while?" he asked, and he thought he had the eloquence to make her change her mind.

But Ginny was no longer there. Listening now, Harry thought he could hear her talking to someone in the kitchen below, probably through the Floo. Maybe she would spend the night over at the Burrow again.

Harry buried his head in his hands, and sat there until his stomach calmed down, and so did his emotions, a little. Then he looked up. He really needed to talk to someone, and he thought it would have to be Hermione. Ginny wasn't her blood sister, and Harry reckoned that the slow-motion collapse of their marriage would put Ron in the middle more than it would Hermione.

_Slow-motion collapse_. Was that really what was going to happen to them, all because they had got impatient and couldn't wait?

Harry shook his head. He didn't want to think about such things, not alone. He wanted to talk to Hermione and have her laugh at him and tell him that it was crazy and he was mental and there would be a way to work this out.

But he had a rush of adrenaline through his veins, the way he got on a bad case, that warned him it might not happen. Not this time.

* * *

"I don't know what's got into Ginny." Hermione was frowning, pushing her hair out of her eyes so that she could concentrate on Harry and the cup of tea in front of him. "I don't know why she wants to get pregnant so suddenly. Were you talking about it?"

"We were talking about it, but we hadn't decided on a date or anything." Harry sipped at the tea, more because Hermione was looking at him than because he wanted it. His throat felt too dry for the tea to affect it. "She wanted to see what would happen in her current season with the Harpies, and then—then decide."

"And now she wants something that she thought she could have, that she could think about in the future, and which she's afraid that she's lost forever," Hermione whispered, her expression lightening. "Oh, I think I understand now. It's not right, but she wants to rush into something to celebrate still being able to have children herself." She reached out and gripped Harry's hand tightly.

"_Celebrate_?" Harry thought he would choke on the word, but he did manage to get it out enough for Hermione to understand.

"Do you remember what happened at Fred's funeral?" Hermione asked, instead of responding directly.

Harry clucked his tongue and looked away. Fred's funeral had been sadder for George than anyone else, but sad enough for the rest of the Weasley family. Molly hadn't stopped crying during the entire burial. Arthur sat there like a stone, not even able to pat Molly's back or say anything comforting to her. Ginny had held on tightly enough to Harry's hand that his fingers were mashed when he finally managed to take them out of her hold.

And when the burial was complete and the small stone tomb rose above Fred's body, Ginny had taken Harry's other hand and drawn him to his feet, not saying a word, and they had Apparated home and made love for two hours.

"It wasn't _at _Fred's funeral," he muttered, for a final rebellion, even though it was weak and he knew it.

Hermione gave him a smile that was almost too gentle and understanding to be real. "Ron and I did the same thing, Harry. It's natural to want to celebrate life when you're in the midst of death. Maybe not every time or just in that way, but I also think it's why so many people get drunk after funerals. Some kind of celebration, some way to spit at death."

Harry shut his eyes. He and Ginny had only been teenagers then, not married, but maybe it would have been better to conceive a child then, so that they wouldn't end up like this.

"And so this is what she's trying to do," he whispered. "Run out and—and mourn and celebrate that she's the one who escaped being infertile?"

"Yes, I think so," said Hermione. "It's only a theory, but it's one that would make a lot of sense."

Harry bowed his head, and said nothing in response. It did make sense, and in some ways he couldn't blame Ginny for it. This whole mess was the fault of no one but the wizard who had cast the curse on him in the first place—or the whole lot of them who had attacked him, since their magic had combined with a relatively minor hex to render him infertile.

It still hurt like hell, though. He wanted to rage and scream and stomp his foot, and there was no way he could do that.

"D'you think Ginny is going to come back?" he asked then, the question he had told himself he wouldn't ask because it wasn't fair to Hermione, but which burst out of him anyway. "Once she gets past this notion that she has to have a child right away to celebrate being able to? Do you think she'll come back to me?"

Silence. Harry had thought Hermione would offer some sort of reassurance or explanation right away. It was what she did. He ended up opening his eyes to look at her.

Hermione just sat there staring at him. "I really don't know," she said.

Once again, Harry felt like he was falling, but this time, he thought it likely he would never land.


	3. Starfall

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Starfall_

"I didn't really do it, you know."

Ginny's voice came from behind him. Harry had taken the day off work after Kingsley talked to him about yelling at people who had nothing to do with the case that had made him infertile. He sighed and rolled his head on his neck hard enough to pop a few things, then turned around.

"You didn't run off and sleep with someone to get pregnant?" he asked.

Ginny walked into the drawing room and sat down on the couch next to him, the same couch where Harry had held her while she cried at the news that they really couldn't have children. She sat a distance away from him, her head turned to the side. After the last fight they had had, though, Harry couldn't really blame her.

"No," she said. "When it came down to it, I discovered that one thing was missing." She turned and met Harry's eyes expectantly.

Harry had no idea what _could _be missing. Ginny had made it obvious that she wanted to sleep with someone, and she seemed to have a candidate in mind. "Love?" he finally asked, when the silence had stretched so long that it would be more uncomfortable to let it go on than to break it.

Ginny did a whole-body flinch. "No," she whispered. "Your consent, Harry. I want to know that my child is going to be loved, and brought into a home where it's loved."

"You said it," Harry said, and turned back to the paper. "Your child. Not mine."

There was a long pause. Ginny was fighting a battle, Harry knew, but he didn't know what the stakes were or what the outcome would be. She had made it clear that she cared more about the chance of having children right now than she did anything else. She probably _should _finish the battle and make her decision.

He was trying to pretend it didn't hurt him, and of course it did, it hurt like a shard of ice shoved into his lungs. But trying to hold her back or change her mind could hurt worse. He didn't want to fight constantly with Ginny. He wanted them to stand together and have love and support and find a way to overcome this.

"It could be ours," Ginny said. "Not many people would ever have to know that they weren't yours. The father would, of course, and my family. But not many other people."

Harry glanced at her sideways. "I don't want rumors circulating, though. Does the man you were planning to sleep with and ask to give you children look much like me?"

Such a deep blush overspread Ginny's cheeks that she looked fevered. She took a sheet of the paper that had escaped onto the floor and looked at it. "No."

"Well, then," said Harry, and snapped the _Prophet _straight.

This time, Ginny's hand tore straight through the paper, snatching it up and discarding handfuls of it on the floor. Harry stared at her, frankly shocked. He had never thought he would see her like that.

"We _have _to have children somehow," Ginny hissed. "This is the best way. We don't have to go into the Muggle world, we don't have to worry about our child not being magical, we don't have to wait to adopt one. We can have a baby as soon as we want one, and the child will be healthy and—"

"Not mine," said Harry firmly. "And apparently you want to sleep with someone who's going to look different enough from me that lots of people might get the idea that the kid isn't mine, either." He took a deep breath. "Listen, Ginny. I thought about this the other day, but not in time." He stopped himself from saying "in time to stop you from walking away." He had to be so careful. "Why don't we wait a bit? Maybe in time, I'll get used to the idea that I can't have children. Maybe one or both of us will lose this attachment to the idea that we have to have children of our blood." He knew it would be difficult for him to lose, but he thought he could. "Just—right now it's still too overwhelming."

"I want a baby."

"It can wait."

"I don't want to. I shouldn't have to."

"_Why_?" Fuck Hermione's theory, Harry was going to ask the question outright. "Why does it have to be _now_, when you were even discussing waiting until the next season was over? What happened?"

"This happened!" Ginny flung a hand at him. "I want a baby now, before someone finds out about the infertility and starts spreading rumors around! We can have at least one. We can have a _few_."

Harry stared at her. "You're worried about rumors, but you want to sleep with someone who looks really different from me."

Ginny shut her eyes and looked away. "I don't know if I can explain it. I don't know if I should have to. All right? All I know is I started thinking about all the chances that we've already missed, the babies we _could _have conceived years ago if we were working on it! And I don't want to take the chance that someone will curse me, too, or I'll be in some kind of flying accident and die. I want to have children."

_It was what Hermione said it was, after all._ Harry bit back the impulse to snap, given that. He swallowed deeply and nodded. "Okay. Okay. But if you want to quit the team for a while and stay at home, then you won't be in danger of getting cursed or dying in a broom accident. I can make enough to support both of us. In the meantime, we can think about it and work on it."

"I don't want to."

Harry felt as though a dragon had given him a dull blow to the chest with its tail. "What?" he whispered.

"I didn't want to do this." Tears were slipping down Ginny's cheeks. "I didn't want to choose between you and having children. But I want them _so badly_, Harry, and I really don't want to wait. I can walk out this door and be pregnant in a few hours. That's never going to happen with you. Never."

_Goddamn it. _Less than a month had passed since Yellowborn had walked into that room and told Harry what was the matter. He _ought _to have had more time to deal with it than this. He _needed _more time to deal with it than this.

Ginny ought to have given him that time.

"If you choose your children and whoever this man is you want to father them over me," he said, "fine. I'm moving out."

Ginny's mouth drooped open a little. "What?" She stood up and reached out to him, then clasped her hands back together against her chest.

"You heard me," Harry said. His teeth felt as if they would crack, he was pressing them together so hard. "You made your choice, and you can't stand staying here with me and trying to adopt or work out a solution so that you're not—you're not sleeping with someone else. Your children and having them now are more important than waiting. Well, waiting is important to _me._ Your life changed, but my fucking life changed too, Ginny!" His voice finally escaped his control, but Ginny wasn't frightened; she just went on staring at him. "I want to think about this and try to come to fucking _terms _with it instead of just having to jump into something new! So I'll move out." He turned and began Summoning his clothes and Auror robes and everything else he could think of from upstairs.

"You're not being reasonable," said Ginny. "You're talking like we're going to get a divorce right away."

"You want children right away," Harry said, spinning around to sneer at her. "Why not a divorce?"

Ginny tried to touch him. Harry avoided her. He was burning hot and bitter and _angry_. He'd been denying himself time to mourn, trying to be sensitive to everybody, Yellowborn and Ginny and Ron and Molly in case he put them in the middle of a divorce, and he hadn't been able to sit down and cry for long.

Now he felt he was about to. He was going to do it in private, though, away from someone who was already daydreaming about the man she was going to fuck and the children she was going to have.

"_Harry_."

"No." They were both being unreasonable and stubborn and wrong, maybe, but Harry was not going to sit around being the patient one in that situation. His clothes had come flying down the stairs by now, and it was a simple matter to Summon that old trunk he'd had with him so long ago, at the Dursleys'. He'd kept it for sentimental reasons, but it was useful now, as he stuffed his clothes in it and then shrank it and tucked it in his pocket.

"You need to calm down and listen to me." Ginny spoke as though she was going to restrain him simply by moving around in front of him and lifting one stern hand.

"You're the one who wants to walk away from me because I'm defective now and get pregnant right this minute." Harry glared at her. "Get out of my way."

"I never said that!"

"I could get pregnant in a few hours," Harry told her in a mocking voice. "I want to stare into someone's eyes and know that he loves me and—"

"This is horrible." Ginny's eyes were filled with tears again. Harry thought he had seen her cry more in the last month than in the entire five years of their marriage. Well, fine. _He _had felt more like shit in the last month than in the entire five years of their marriage. "You're horrible! I told you those things and they were real and sincere and only meant for your ears, and now you're throwing them back in my face?"

"I'm throwing them back in the face of the woman who chose having children over me," Harry said, barely holding onto his temper. "Get the fuck out of my way."

"We could still be a family if you would make the choice to love them!"

That was so ridiculous that Harry didn't know what to say. So he said nothing. And he didn't try to go to the Floo or the door, since Ginny was blocking him from both of them, and he didn't try to tear open the wards and Apparate, which would leave Ginny and anyone else in the house without defenses. He touched the emergency Portkey coiled around his throat instead, the one that was made to replace the upper button in any shirt he wore.

The flowing colors snatched him away and deposited him in his office. Harry wavered for a second on unsteady legs before he collapsed into his chair. Thank Merlin, it was the middle of the afternoon and most people had already left. Including Ron.

Harry flung a locking spell at the door, though, because it would be just his luck that someone would hear him and get curious, and then buried his head in his hands.

He didn't cry as much as he had thought he would. His shoulders heaved, and there were a few dry sobs. But the rage was worse than the sadness, burning up the sorrow like a forest fire devouring trees.

He sat there and let it pass through him, and when it got bad enough that he had to do something with it or go insane, he hurled the ornamental paperweight he'd got for finishing Auror training at the wall. He'd never liked the stupid thing, anyway.

* * *

"You look like hell. And Ginny said that you didn't come home last night."

Harry lifted one shoulder in a weary shrug. Ron had come into the office and stood studying him for some time from the doorway, while Harry slogged through paperwork and didn't look up. "So speaketh the trained investigator, right?"

"So speaketh the concerned best friend and brother-in-law, too." Ron walked over to his own desk and started rearranging his files with careless hands. He didn't take his eyes off Harry.

Harry held back the jolt that came from hearing those last words, and swallowed. "Well, you might not be that much longer."

"Which one?" Ron gave up on pretending to pay attention to the files and turned to look at Harry. "The best friend or the brother-in-law?"

"Ginny and I are getting a divorce. And I'm not sure that you want to stay my best friend now that you've heard that."

Ron looked down at the floor and clenched his jaw. Harry waited. It seemed to take a long time for the words to creep up Ron's throat, but then, he finally shook his head and spoke.

"I don't think you did anything deliberately to hurt Ginny. She wants children, and you can't have them. That's it, isn't it?"

Harry frowned. He wondered for a moment if Hermione had mentioned their conversation to Ron, but he didn't think so. Ron had probably just figured it out based on what he knew about Ginny and the hex that had hit Harry. "Yes. Basically."

"Then that makes it sad." Ron's throat worked, and he turned away as though he couldn't look at Harry any longer, sitting down behind his desk. "But not anyone's fault."

Harry was quiet. He wanted to believe Ron, that the rest of the Weasleys would think the same thing and not exile him completely from their family, but Ginny was their daughter and their sister. Harry would expect them to choose her over him. They couldn't give up on being related to her because her marriage to Harry didn't work out.

The way he sometimes did when it was really important, Ron heard his thoughts and answered them without being a Legilimens. "We can't give up on you being my best friend, either. Unless you're going to walk away from me now, because you're afraid of what I might do in the future."

Harry stood up and walked over to him. Ron still hunched at his desk as though he was uncertain, so Harry clapped him on the shoulder, and made Ron look at him. "No," he said quietly. "I might have to stop coming over to the Burrow for a while, or to your house, but I'm going to be right here."

Ron exhaled shakily and reached up for one second, catching Harry's hand in a grip so firm that it left bruises on his wrist. Then he turned around and picked up the file in front of him. "Good, because we have a case to work on."

Harry smiled.

* * *

"You know I don't mind if you stay here, Harry." Dean's voice was soft, and he held open his door to Harry. "Better than staying in the Leaky Cauldron or sleeping in your office anyway. You know, the way Ron said you did last night?" There was a sharp edge to his voice there.

"Well, I _was _going to get a room in the Leaky Cauldron," Harry said mildly, looking around the drawing room that Dean had ushered him into. It had enormous walls, bare except for a huge painting in the middle of each one. The painting directly in front of Harry was a seascape with waves crashing on the rocks in the foreground, and things that might have been dolphins or whales leaping in the background. The one over to the side had lots of hot colors, red and gold.

Dean didn't give him time to work out what it was or look at the rest. He walked around in front of Harry and scowled at him. "When were you going to tell me and Seamus and Neville what was going on with you and Ginny?"

"Er, well," said Harry, and spent some time scratching the back of his neck and walking over to look at the red and gold painting on the wall. "Did you paint this? It's really good. Is it the Gryffindor common room?"

"It's a rose the way a bee might see it," said Dean, and shook his head. "You're not going to get me off-track. I know you weren't planning to meet us there and talk about Ginny and whatever is happening between you, but I need to know."

Harry sighed. He had been out with Ron, and Seamus and Neville and Dean had showed up unexpectedly to celebrate Dean selling a painting to a rich patron. They'd joined him and Ron without waiting for an invitation. Apparently they'd overheard more than Harry meant them to first, or at least Dean had.

"I found out about a month ago that I couldn't have children," he said. Make it as blunt as possible and get this over with. "A curse hit me and combined with other curses, and there's no chance of reversing it now."

"Jesus, mate," said Dean, one hand going out as though he was going to touch Harry's shoulder. He hesitated, letting it hover in the air. Harry sighed and clasped his hand. Dean shook his head. "What an awful thing."

Harry nodded. "It hit—I mean, Ginny and I were planning on starting a family soon, you know? And it hit her hard when she figured out that she wouldn't have my children."

"But there are so many ways around that," said Dean, with what Harry knew now was the enviable certainty of someone raised in the Muggle world. "You could ask about artificial insemination, or adopt a child, or see if there's a Muggleborn who's being mistreated by their family—"

"I didn't even think about that last one," Harry admitted. Since the war, there were better mechanisms and spells in place to track children and figure out if anyone Muggleborn had been mistreated by their parents since their accidental magic started to show itself. Harry had been instrumental in helping McGonagall set those up at Hogwarts. "But Ginny doesn't want artificial insemination. She wants to know who the father is. And she wants—well, both of us want a blood child more than an adopted one."

Dean stared at him. "Even though you can't have one?"

"Ginny still could." Harry rubbed his face, then took off his glasses to clean them. Just talking about this was making him tired all over again. "That's what our fight was about. She wants to have a child with someone else. I don't want her to."

"Well, you're still _married_," said Dean. He went into his kitchen and came back with a can of Muggle beer, raising it in silent invitation. Harry nodded and accepted it gratefully, popping it open and drinking what felt like half in one gulp. "You don't think that you're going to get back together?"

"No." Harry sank down on Dean's couch, where he could see the rose painting. "If you still fancy her…"

"That was a long time ago," said Dean, his voice neutral. He sat down on the couch across from Harry, beneath the rose painting. "Besides, I'm not sure that I want to sleep with her if all she's interested in is my sperm."

"Point." Harry sighed and shut his eyes. He was still trying to be fair to Ginny, but it was nice to be talking to someone who wasn't a Weasley by blood or marriage, and wouldn't expect him to be completely fair all the time. "I keep thinking that we could work things out if we'd just _waited_. But she wants a kid now."

"Hmmm," said Dean, and drank most of his own beer.

"And I can kind of understand it, and I kind of blame her." Harry drank some more and decided that he didn't really want to talk about Ginny after all. "Are you sure that me staying here is no problem? I mean, I can pay you all the Galleons you want—"

"I'd prefer Muggle money." Dean grinned at him. "A lot of my clients are Muggles. Less to explain when they come into the flat if I don't have gold lying around. And there's no problem. I took this place because it had a room I wanted to use as a studio, but the light isn't nearly as good as I thought it was. Feel free to use that room. If I want it back, I'll let you know."

"Thanks, Dean," said Harry, and choked down a hiccough. That would be too embarrassing, show that he was drinking that much already. "You're a mate."

"I'd do it for a lot of people," said Dean, and gave Harry what Harry thought was a compassionate look, although by closing his eyes, he managed to avoid seeing it. "And you sound like you're in a lot of trouble."

"Not _that _much," Harry said, and wrapped a hand around his eyes. "I just wasn't expecting this, and I have to spend some time over the next few days moving things out and reckoning out how much in the vaults is mine. Or which vaults." He and Ginny had established a new, joint vault when they married, but Harry had kept some money back, with the vague intention of using it for their kids' Hogwarts schooling someday.

Thinking about that now was like a blow to the throat.

But he would have to think about lots of other things and get used to them, and he was determined to change the subject instead of dwelling on his own problems all the time. "So tell me about your paintings and what you've sold recently."

Dean opened his mouth, caught Harry's eye, and seemed to realize that now would be the wrong time to press. He cleared his throat. "Well, that rose-painting you were admiring? I've sold a copy of it to someone who wants to keep secret, but I can tell his name to a _real _friend…"

Harry listened to Dean for the rest of the evening, managing to enjoy the fact that one of his friends was prospering even if he wasn't. And he could laugh and love and be happy with the rest of them, he thought, as long as he thought about his friends' success and didn't concentrate on his own _lack _of success. It was important to him, but it couldn't be the consuming importance of his life. He would have to learn to rise above it.

* * *

Still, that night, as he lay in Dean's spare bedroom and listened to Dean's comfortable snoring from down the corridor, the thought of it returned full force, clawing at the inside of Harry's skull and skin until he felt that he'd like to explode out of both of them.

Harry shivered and laid an arm carefully over his eyes. He was a little drunk, but not enough to think that leaving Dean's house and going flying, the way that he usually did when he was this upset, was a good idea. He would probably crash the broom into something, and besides, this was a Muggle neighborhood.

But he had to have _some _outlet. And that was what finally made him stand up and go searching in the little trunk he'd left, tossing robes around until he found one that was weighed down by the extra bulk in one pocket. He pulled out the flat journal and stared at it.

Hermione had given it to him a year ago, saying that she thought writing down some of the thoughts and emotions he battled would help him. The same day, a stone propelled by a curse had failed to damage Harry as thoroughly as it could have because the journal was in his pocket. He had carried it since then, to honor Hermione and the luck she'd given him, but he'd never seriously considered using it. Only Ginny had a better reason than he did to be wary of diaries.

_Ginny_.

The tide of grief came back, and Harry tore open the cover of the journal and groped for a quill, finding one finally in the bottom of his trunk.

He had to have some escape, or he was going to go mad. He couldn't have a Time-Turner. He couldn't make it never have happened with a wish. But he _wanted _to be someone it had never happened to.

More than anything, he wanted to be normal. He wanted his parents back. He wanted the war not to have happened. He wanted a wife and a family and friends who adored him, and even though he had the last, all the rest was aching like a wound in the back of his head now.

Maybe he could never have that. But he could _create _someone who did.

So he scribbled on the first page of the journal, _My name is Ethan Starfall, and I have three children and a wife who loves me and parents named Isidora and Julian who love me._

Harry's breathing slowed. He found his eyelids drooping, as if the words were a draught of Dreamless Sleep. He dropped the journal back in his trunk and curled up in his bed, sighing as sleep came sweeping towards him.

* * *

That was how it began.


	4. Ethan

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Ethan_

Kingsley's voice was very gentle, but in that way that meant it would get sharp later if Harry didn't pay attention. "Harry? Are you listening?"

Harry sighed and lifted his gaze from the table in front of him to focus on Kingsley. "Yes, I am," he said. "McCann has been arrested twice, but managed to slip away from us each time. You think someone has been losing evidence on purpose. That means that we have suspect someone in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and be careful about what we share with whom."

Kingsley went on watching him. Harry looked stoically back. He was dealing better with things now, since he had moved in with Dean and heard messages from the Weasley family that they didn't plan to turn their backs on him despite the divorce, but he wasn't going to play the pretend game of how he was perfectly fine.

Kingsley finally grunted. "A good summary," he said, and tapped his wand against the parchment in front of him. A photograph of Reynold McCann appeared on the wall, blown up to gigantic size, like a Muggle projection. "Now, remember, McCann is an expert dueler. We think that one of his connections might be to an old classmate or teacher in the Department, but given how many people have that kind of training…"

Harry stifled another sigh and studied McCann. He was so distinctive in his features—hair even more orange than Ron's, a huge scar on the left side of his face, and almost-gold hazel eyes—that he would probably be going about under a glamour anyway, which made everything all the harder.

Harry knew McCann was dangerous. He knew that he and Ron would be assigned to this case because they were one of the most effective partner teams when it came to keeping each other from being injured.

_But not hexed._

The last thing he wanted to do was start blaming Ron for the hex that had made him infertile, though, and Harry ruthlessly put the thought away and went back to listening to Kingsley. He could do this. He still wanted to be an Auror, although Kingsley himself had advised Harry to take some time off, or at least temporarily switch to a different partner other than Ron, when he had thought there would be some nastiness about the divorce.

But this was what came nearest to normal in Harry's life right now, and he didn't want to lose it. He listened.

* * *

The other part of the reason he was coping, and didn't break down when Ginny sent him a letter asking him to reconsider the divorce, was the journal that he had begun keeping as Ethan Starfall.

Harry had never thought he was a good storyteller or anything, mostly because he had never tried. But the details of Ethan's life were just there when he reached for them, the details that came from his own deepest desires.

His parents were Isidora and Julian Starfall, the way that Harry had come up with the names on that first night, but the more Harry wrote about them, the more he came to believe in them. They weren't perfect. They fought sometimes. But Isidora was the sort of witch who came up with charms to cast on her not-perfectly-cooked food to make it taste better, and comforted Ethan when he was sick, and doted on her grandchildren. And Julian was the sort of wizard who would have fought to protect his children if he had to, but he didn't have to; he grew herbs that were of use to apothecaries instead, and peacefully sold them. His hands always smelled like dirt and weeds.

Writing about Ethan's children was equally as easy. Harry knew without thinking about it that their names were James, Albus, and Lily—names that he thought he probably couldn't have got Ginny to agree to in reality, but this wasn't reality. James was nearing the age when he would go to Hogwarts, because Ethan was older than Harry, and he had red hair and a reckless grin. And Al had inherited Ethan's poor sight and hazel eyes, and he worried a lot about what other people thought of him. Lily was lazy and spoiled and sweet; she just smiled to get her way, instead of throwing a tantrum. Most people gave in to her.

It was when he had to talk about Ethan's wife, Anne, that Harry hesitated, and wanted to backtrack. Did he really need to talk about her at all? Ethan was the sort of wizard who—

Who adored his wife, and would talk about her constantly. And being married was an important part of that normal life that Harry wanted for himself. Having a divorce wasn't.

He knew it was fiction. That was the important part, that it _was _fiction. It was different from reality, and helped him hide from it, a little. Sometimes, when he stood up from writing down a description of Ethan playing with his children or watching fireworks with his wife, he wondered if he could really go through the divorce with Ginny. There was his last chance at a normal life in reality slipping through the cracks.

But what he and Ginny had said to each other wasn't normal. That _rage _wasn't normal. The grief was, but they hadn't managed it well together. Harry wanted a divorce so that he could recuperate at a distance and think about it later, and hopefully be friends with Ginny as well as the rest of the Weasleys someday, and maybe not be so bitter about it when he heard Ginny was pregnant.

So he told Ginny he wanted a divorce, and flung himself into the McCann case whenever he was around Ron, and left Ethan at home. His name might literally mean that a star had fallen, but that was in Harry's life, not his.

* * *

"Out with it." Harry put down his fork and leaned commandingly forwards to look into Hermione's eyes.

"What?" Hermione lifted one hand and stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

"You've been giving Ron those sideways looks that you think I don't notice and hemming and hawing around something for days now," said Harry firmly. They were seated in Ron and Hermione's back garden, because it was a fine, cool night, and Hermione was pointing out stars to them that she said centaurs had different names for. "I told myself I was going to talk to you about it tonight. So I am."

Hermione bit her lip and lowered her plate to the grass, as if this wasn't an announcement that she could make while holding it. Ron put an arm around her shoulders and glanced at Harry gravely.

For a second, Harry was afraid they were going to tell him that they were supporting Ginny's side in the divorce, and his slowly pounding heart seemed to consume the universe. But then Hermione said, "I'm pregnant. And we didn't know how to tell you."

Harry swallowed, carefully, but his heartbeat slowed down. Then he said, "Well. Congratulations. I want—I mean, I wish I had a child on the way to play with him or her, but I can't not congratulate you."

Hermione's smile was slow, as if checking that he meant it, but luminous when it did finally come. She nodded and reached out a hand to Harry. He went with it, clasping her hand firmly enough that she finally seemed to believe him. "Thank you," she whispered. "It would have hurt to think that we couldn't share this with you."

Ron still had his arm around Hermione's shoulders, but he reached out to touch Harry's wrist in the hand Hermione was holding. "You're going to be named godfather," he said. "I hope you realize that. We wouldn't think of having anyone else."

Harry nodded. "I know that." He sat there for a few seconds, holding onto his friends, envisioning the way their kid would look. Who knew if it would be a boy or a girl, but Harry saw a girl with Hermione's wrinkled forehead poring over a book, a boy with Ron's red hair, a girl with brown frizzy hair, a boy riding a broom and laughing.

When his friends finally let him go, Harry felt more settled and calm. Not everything was disintegrating, and if he couldn't have children of his own, then he would have to learn to be a good uncle and godfather.

It wasn't perfect. He didn't feel at all like it was right now. But he would get used to it.

_The same way I could have got used to Ginny wanting to have a child if she had just waited and _talked _to me about it…_

But that line of thinking would only make Harry bitter in a way he was trying to learn not to be. He stopped it as firmly as he could, and picked up his glass.

"So what names are you thinking about?" he asked, and unwittingly sparked a long and bitter fight that made him forget all about his own bitterness, in laughing at the bickering of his two best friends.

* * *

Ethan was quiet in Harry's head most of the time. He knew he had to raise walls between his day life and his fantasy life. His fantasy life was there to help him cope. He didn't think that any of his friends would really make life difficult for him if they found out that he was writing in this journal, but it would be embarrassing, and hard to explain.

So he worked. And then he came home and wrote of comfortable arguments with Anne, of the way that Ethan's children played around him, of the way that Ethan himself made a living as a supplier of utterly tame and insignificant magical creatures, like flobberworms, for Potions ingredients. Anne was the Auror, the one with an exciting and dangerous life. Ethan was the one who stayed home with the children and got to enjoy them all the time.

He hadn't been in Britain during the war, because his parents had gone abroad the minute they realized how dangerous things were getting and had taken him with them. Ethan had lived in Spain, and could speak some Spanish, which Harry looked up and learned. He had come back to Britain after the war and lived in quiet contentment, without scars, without nightmares.

Everything in his life was very boring and quiet, but sunny and vivid, with the colors that Harry thought would come from a garden in the height of summer. The words slipped out of his quill more and more easily the more he practiced, although he had never done this before. Of course, he'd never had a need like this to do it before.

_Today Anne said that we hadn't been spending enough time together. So we went outside and had a little picnic in the garden near a stand of the flowers that Father planted for me. He said that they would grow into champion potions ingredients, but I'm afraid that I've never tested that. I don't know that much about plants compared to animals, anyway. I only know that there were purple flowers on it, and they smelled sweet when Anne plucked them off and threw them at me because I teased her about letting McCann get away._

Harry paused when he realized that name had showed up, and carefully scratched it out, turning it into _Maudsley_. He was determined that nothing of reality would intrude here. Next thing he knew, he might start talking as though he was Ethan Starfall in daily life.

And he wasn't. He couldn't be. Not without a wife and children. Not without parents. Not without that blessed and sunny past that Ethan lived in and swam in, like a fish through water, while at the same time never taking it for granted, because he had seen how other, less happy people lived.

Harry shut the journal and put it away for the night, and went to bed to dream of happiness.

* * *

"Do you really dare to confront me, Potter?"

Harry moved forwards, unhurried. He and Ron had finally tracked Reynold McCann down, in a house that belonged to one of the brothers of an Auror Hendred. Kingsley's suspicions had been right, and McCann had escaped capture so far because he was being tipped off by an Auror who had once trained with him in dueling classes and was fond of him. That was Hendred, arrested earlier this evening.

Now Harry and Ron just had to bring McCann in, and they could consider this case officially over and done with.

"I don't know why I wouldn't dare," Harry said, his eyes carefully traveling around the dusty room. It was probably the drawing room, but the house had been abandoned for years and they'd covered all the furniture, making it hard to be sure. There was a bowl of dried fruit and nuts McCann had been eating on one table, and footprints in the dust winding back and forth. "You don't have your wand." Ron had Disarmed him on the stairs, right before McCann ran in here and Harry followed, and a trapped door had fallen into the frame between the two rooms.

"But what other traps might I not have?" McCann was backing up, trying to lead Harry towards what was probably a couch, grinning all the while. "You should think of that, and think of whether you dare to confront me until you know everything about the house!"

Harry didn't waste breath on a reply. He knew one such trap was probably near the couch, because McCann kept trying to lead him in that direction, and he wasn't even being _subtle _about it.

On the other hand, Harry didn't think he had to move, not when he could set up a trap of his own.

He cast a non-verbal Throwing Charm on the bowl of fruit and nuts, and it flew through the air towards the back of McCann's head. He spun around at the faint whistling noise. All that meant was that the bowl hit him in the face instead of the back of the head, and he went down heavily, his skull bouncing off the cushions of the couch.

"You need to think about unexpected traps, too," Harry told him, and then bound and Stunned him, floating him back towards the door between the two rooms. Whatever other traps might be here, he would leave them to the members of the Department who would be conducting the official corruption investigation. Auror Hendred, or her brother, might have helped other criminals slip away; the existence of a conveniently abandoned and booby-trapped house suggested that, at least.

The door dissolved just as he got there, under the pressure of an Acid Curse. Ron stumbled through, swearing.

"The spells on that thing would have worked at Gringotts," he muttered, and then stopped when he saw McCann floating on the air behind Harry. "You got him?"

Harry nodded, and smiled at Ron. "He won't get away this time. He implied there were traps in this room, too, though, so I'd rather get out of here and let the Hit Wizards come back and figure out what's what."

"Good," said Ron, and glanced around at the empty, silent house, shuddering. "I don't want to spend any more time here than I have to."

Harry thought about teasing him about the presence of spiders, but Ron had probably already thought of that on his own, and a joke was always less funny when you were the second one telling it. They took McCann in.

Only later that evening, when he and Dean were watching the telly and Dean was telling him furiously about how his favorite football team had only lost their last game because the other team had cheated, did Harry realize something. He had focused on the case and McCann until the end, and hadn't thought about Ginny and his lost children at all.

It didn't mean the pain was gone. But it meant that the pain was no longer the center of his life, and that some of the things he was doing to try to handle it were working.

Harry hid his smile behind his next beer.

* * *

Ethan knew a lot about children and animals and love, but it was all small knowledge. He didn't know about the horrible, painful things that Harry did. He had never heard of Horcruxes. He would stare if someone asked him about the Sword of Gryffindor or the defenses at Gringotts. He kind of assumed that the grand people were all somewhere else, living their own lives, and would leave the ordinary wizards like him to take care of themselves.

Harry drowned himself in that life, in that life he wished he could live, in that life he wished he'd been left to live.

_Mother asked me today if I thought that Al had been spending rather too much time by himself. I told her that I didn't think he had, but that I'd look into it. And I found Al sitting with his legs kicking on the edge of the wall at the back of the garden and frowning at nothing, and I began to think Mother had been right._

_I asked him what was wrong. Al didn't answer for a long time, and then he turned and looked up at me._

"_Why did you name me Albus?" he asked. "James and Lily are just normal names, but I have to go by a nickname because Albus is so unusual. The only thing people want to ask me when they hear my name is whether I was named after Albus Dumbledore, and I don't even know how to answer them, because you never told me why._"

_I couldn't believe that we'd neglected to give him the answer for so long. I took his hand and said, "You were named after Dumbledore, in a way. We left the country during the war, you know, Grandmother and Grandfather and myself." Al nodded, because he knows that. I told them that story early on, because so many other families had war stories, and they deserved to know why we didn't have any. "But my parents heard about Albus Dumbledore and how brave he was and the sacrifices they made. They hoped they would have another child and they could name him Albus, but they never did. So I decided to name you that._"

_Al sat there and thought for a long time. I hoped he wasn't too offended about being named after a dead person, but finally he sat up and said, "Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Dad." And he went back to the house, and a while later I saw him flying._

_I hope that my relationships with my children are always that gentle and easy. I know they can't always be, especially because all of them will be teenagers at the same time, but right now, it seems like they will be._

Harry slept hard after that, and his mind was filled with images of a life that he wasn't living, but one he could make up.

* * *

Ginny came up to him on the day they were supposed to meet with the solicitor to sign the divorce papers, and asked quietly, "Can I talk to you?"

"Of course," said Harry. "That's what we're here for, isn't it?" He followed her into one of the little anterooms that the solicitor had set aside in her house. Harry thought that giving couples privacy to talk was probably one of the purposes of those anterooms. This one, at least, was pretty, with some stones set on the wall in the shape of a peacock's tail and a spell that made an illusion of water flow down from under them.

"Don't be cruel," said Ginny, and she faced him with her hands clenched in front of her. "I'm asking you one more time to think about the divorce. To—not go through with it. You were right. I was acting irrationally because the—the hex was so sudden. But if I'd had more time to think about it, I would agree with you. Let's give it a few years. Maybe we can come around to the idea of adoption."

Harry thought about that. He knew that two months ago, when he was still swaying back and forth between pain and rage, he would have leaped at the chance. At least that meant Ginny had reconsidered, and the pig-headed way she had insisted that of course she was right had been the one thing Harry hated the most.

But now, with the curse three months behind him and the image of the marriage he wanted in the journal he was keeping as Ethan…

Harry carefully put the thought of Ethan away—he would never think it in front of anyone who was part of his real life—and asked, "What does it mean to you, that I got cursed and the first thing we leaped to was thinking that it was horrible if we didn't have blood children? And that we yelled at each other and insulted each other?"

Ginny blinked. "That we were under a lot of stress?"

"We were," said Harry. "But you were irrational, and you went on acting that way. And then I wanted a divorce over something that should have been handled other ways, probably." He saw the protest rising in Ginny's eyes, and spoke on before she could continue. "We both didn't trust each other. We both leaped too quickly into anger. We both—Ginny, our marriage wasn't strong. I want a strong marriage. We didn't have one."

"We _did!_ We loved each other! We were married for five years!"

"And all it took to undo that was the thought that we couldn't have children." Harry had to turn away and look at the wall. He wasn't as calm as he wanted to be. The rage was clogging his throat, making it hurt, but on the other hand, he knew what he wanted to say this time. "I think we married each other thinking we would have kids together. We _had _to have kids together, or it wasn't a real marriage. And we didn't care enough about each other to stay together despite that."

"I still want children. But I could get along with adopted children." Ginny's words were cold, though, and Harry noticed she hadn't stepped forwards to put a hand on his shoulder the way she might have at the beginning of the conversation. "That's what I'm telling you. That I know I acted irrationally, and I'm sorry, and this is a second chance."

"I was irrational, and I was weak, and I'm not sorry," said Harry, looking at her now. "Because it wasn't enough."

Ginny folded her shoulders up. "I'm willing to wait for children! What else do I need to do?"

"_Listen _to me?" Harry snapped, his own anger rising again. "Because I'm saying that it's not enough! We might have to wait years to have children, for me to be comfortable with the idea, and even if you acknowledge that you don't have to have children right now, would you be willing to wait for years?"

The sharp turn of Ginny's head gave him her answer.

Harry nodded, and tried to make his voice softer. "I'm sorry, Ginny. This is—I just want something different, that's all. It's hard on both of us, but I want to have some time alone and think. I just don't want to share this right now."

"So it's selfish as well."

"Yeah," Harry said, and now the rage was running backwards and turning into sadness. "Yeah, I reckon you could say that."

Ginny walked away from him and into the solicitor's office. Harry followed her, shaking his head. Maybe the only marriage he could have was an imaginary one, because he might not ever find someone he loved who would also accept that they couldn't have their own children.

But he knew he wanted more than a marriage that collapsed at the first real challenge. Whether it was weakness in him, or Ginny, or both of them together, or just too much stress, or something else, he didn't really care anymore. His decision to divorce had been quick, but it didn't mean it was the wrong one. He wanted out of this marriage, and into the freedom to—

Think, and heal, and withdraw, and mourn, and do his best to accept.


	5. A Desperate Letter

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five—A Desperate Letter_

"I don't _want _to!"

Draco nearly didn't manage to duck the full inkwell that Scorpius hurled at his head. He cast a hasty spell that caught it in midflight and sent the inkwell back to the desk instead of shattering, but by the time he turned around from casting it, Scorpius had got out of his chair. He was smearing his ink-blackened hands all over the tablecloth, too.

"Scorpius," Draco began, anger rumbling in his gut, but Scorpius turned and ran out of the room.

Draco sat down in the chair Scorpius had been trying to learn to write at, staring sightlessly at the parchment. Scorpius had written a few blobby letters before he ran away. He could do well, Draco knew that. In the days before Draco had divorced Astoria, Scorpius had written out his name and Draco's name and the names of several of his ancestors.

But now Astoria was gone, living on the Continent and pursuing a demanding job that meant she was only able to come and see Scorpius occasionally. She and Draco had agreed that of course Scorpius should stay here; he was the Malfoy heir, and he should be raised appropriately. Astoria could have afforded house-elves with the handsome settlement Draco had given her, but house-elves were no substitute for parents.

Scorpius, though, had taken the divorce a lot harder than Draco had thought he would. It made sense for his parents. They were both bored with each other, and when Astoria had confessed her desire to do magical research on an invention that might replace the Muggle-based Hogwarts Express, Draco had proposed separating. That was agreeable to her.

_I never knew that he would miss Astoria so much, _Draco thought, and stood up to go find Scorpius.

He found him on the grand staircase, prancing up and down and trying to rub the rest of the ink on his fingers against the wallpaper. He stopped when he saw Draco. Draco held back a snort. Scorpius wasn't succeeding anyway, since the ink had dried too much by now.

"You need a bath," Draco told him. He tried to make his voice nice, the way Astoria had told him he should do, but it was impossible. Scorpius just stood there looking more and more mutinous, and that made it hard for Draco to control his temper, too. "You need to get that ink off your fingers. You want to look nice for dinner, don't you? Uncle Blaise is coming over."

Scorpius adored Blaise, but at the moment, he looked as though he would have rather been eaten by wild horses than admit it. "No!"

"No, you don't want to look nice?" Draco tried to raise his eyebrows and look imposing and non-threatening at the same time. He hadn't mastered his father's trick of raising his eyebrows and conveying disappointment with just a head-tilt yet. "Then I'm sure Uncle Blaise will be very disappointed."

Most of the time, that worked on Scorpius, even now that Astoria was gone, but now, it only made tears fill his eyes. He turned and pounded his way up the stairs, yelling, "No!" at every step. A few seconds later, Draco heard the door of his room slam.

Draco sighed and sat down on the lowest step, since there was no one there to see him—except Izzy, the house-elf who appeared a few seconds later, bowing low enough to brush her ears against the floor. "Izzy is to be going and seeing about the young master Malfoy?" she asked, voice shrill enough to hurt Draco's ears.

"Yes," said Draco reluctantly. He really didn't want to spoil Scorpius by sending house-elves to him when he was upset. Scorpius had had them bring him snacks in the past, and toys, and all sorts of other things that evaded the punishments Draco had set, unless Draco specifically remembered to tell the house-elves not to cater to Scorpius. "Just make sure that he hasn't hurt himself or broken anything."

Izzy gave him a grave look and vanished. Draco scowled. It was the same look the elves were always going him when he talked about broken objects, as if they thought Draco should place his son above objects.

And Draco _did, _but it was also true that one of Scorpius's favorite games when he was angry was breaking heirlooms and delicate things and refusing to apologize. If the elves discovered something broken, they came squeaking to him in distress anyway. Draco just got out in front of Scorpius's destructive tendencies by giving them orders about them first.

Izzy's expression lingered with him anyway. Draco stood up and walked rapidly in the direction of his study. It was nearly dinner-time, and he needed a drink to calm down.

* * *

By dinner-time itself, Scorpius had flung a clock at the head of the house-elf who came to tell him it was time to eat, tried to tear his curtains down and forced Izzy to repair them, and screamed through the door at Draco when Draco reminded him that Uncle Blaise would be here soon. Draco told the house-elves to take up a reasonable meal and clean up any food Scorpius dropped on the floor or dishes he broke, and then went to meet with Blaise.

In a way, it was a relief to have only adult conversation at the dining table, but Draco was brooding on Scorpius all the time, and not good company. Blaise noticed it, but manfully kept up the flow of small talk by chattering about the endless details of his mother's latest wedding, until Draco's fifth sigh, when he seemed to lose his temper.

"You need help to deal with that brat," Blaise said, setting aside his fork and plate and giving Draco his full attention. Draco looked listlessly at Blaise's plate. He had lost track of what they were eating. Duck, it looked like.

"Don't call Scorpius a brat," Draco said automatically. Lucius had done it last week, which was why Draco was in the middle of the not-talking-to-his-parents cycle, which happened regularly between them.

"I'll call him what he is," said Blaise. "I can understand that he's upset about losing his mum, but there's a point where a kid crosses the line. I was upset about losing my dad. My mum still told me I was being a brat. I didn't have to attend her next wedding, but I did have to not break every single thing in my rooms in revenge."

"He doesn't break _every single _thing," Draco said, but lifted his hand when Blaise gave him a pointed look. "Right, right, I know. But what can I do? My parents want to take him off my hands and raise him themselves. They say I'm not doing it right, and that you can't raise a Malfoy this way. But I—I don't want to let him go. I love him that much."

He whispered the last words, not sure that Blaise wouldn't roast him alive for them, but Blaise leaned back in his chair with that easy grace he had and sighed towards the ceiling. "Then you find someone else. Couldn't you hire a nanny?"

Draco wrinkled his nose. He knew that some of his ancestors had had nannies for their children, but that was only before they had been able to afford house-elves. "No. I don't want to leave the task of raising him to someone else."

"I thought that was what we were discussing," said Blaise, but subsided when Draco glared at him. "Yes, I understand the difference."

"Then be serious for a second." Draco placed one hand on his forehead and looked off to the side, where the dancing lights of the candles on the table wouldn't hurt his eyes. "No nannies. No one who would live here and help me raise him."

He fell silent, though, thinking, because that was basically what Astoria had done, and things had started to go wrong with Scorpius when she left. Maybe Scorpius did need two parents, and not only one, no matter how steeped in the Malfoys traditions that one was. But where was Draco going to find someone else who wanted to marry him and who wouldn't bore him?

"You could write to the _Prophet _and ask for advice that way," Blaise suggested. "I understand they have people whose whole job is to tell other people what they should do with their lives."

Draco snorted bitterly. "Do you realize how many stories about my divorce the _Prophet _carried? I wouldn't have a chance of remaining anonymous. Even if they published my letter anonymously, someone would link the stories together with my letter, and I don't want Scorpius to be subject to rumors."

"Kidnap a concubine. Only, instead of having sex with you, they have to deal with that hellion. They'll probably be begging to have sex with you in a week."

Draco dropped his hand and glared at Blaise again. "Serious, I know," Blaise said, before Draco could say anything. He shrugged and drank off the rest of his glass of champagne. "That's the best advice I can offer you. Hire someone to help you deal with him, write letters to get help, or read some books. And you already rejected books."

"No, I didn't, because you didn't say anything about it before." Draco found himself sitting up, his muscles quivering with delight. "That's an _idea. _I can go to Flourish and Blotts, and choose books on parenting." He did have to hesitate for a second, wondering if he would have the same problem with choosing books on parenting that he would writing to the _Prophet _for advice about it, but then shook his head decisively. If worst came to worst, he would always _Obliviate _the clerk. "Blaise, you're a genius."

"I'm going to treasure this Pensieve memory for the rest of my life," Blaise said, holding up his champagne glass.

Draco ignored him, and started composing a list of subjects he wanted to look for in his head. It had been years since he was inside the bookshop; he and Astoria had ordered everything they wanted by owl. But he knew he couldn't entrust a task this delicate to anyone else. He would have to go and see what was there.

* * *

"Are you looking for something specific?"

This clerk was the fifth person who had approached him with some well-meaning but vacant question, and Draco clenched his teeth. He went on staring at the shelves as if he hadn't heard, then turned roughly when the clerk began to repeat himself. "_No_. I know that you're trying to keep customers, but trust me, I'll ask you if I want help, all right? And I'm not going to leave without buying something."

The clerk retreated, glaring at him. Draco ignored that. He would much rather take the risk of angering a few people in Flourish and Blotts than let word get out that Draco Malfoy was looking up parenting advice so soon after he had divorced. Perhaps he would disguise the covers of the books when he took them up to the counter, too.

So far, he had seen nothing that interested him. There were surprisingly few books on parenting wizarding children. Mostly, the books seemed to be tales that the authors thought children would like, like _Beedle the Bard, _and observations of Muggle children compiled by world travelers. Draco had picked up one book that promised advice on getting children to behave politely, but it turned out to be exclusively for the parents of Muggleborns.

Draco put the book down, shaking his head. He did notice the worn cover, and wondered idly if the author had ever thought to attribute its lack of success to the fact that few parents of Muggleborns would find the book here, in the _wizarding world._

By the time he had spent two hours in the shop, he was beginning to get desperate. He didn't want to come here and leave with nothing, and not only because he had promised the clerks he wouldn't. This was starting to seem like his last hope before he would have to give in and try one of Blaise's other, less sensible suggestions.

He did finally see a fat book that might do, and when he took it down, he felt a little surge of excitement. _Suggestions for Pure-Blood Family Life. _It was one that his father had once mentioned reading. It wouldn't have specific suggestions for how to raise a pure-blood heir after divorce, because divorce was still so rare among people of Draco's kind, but it would contain many suggestions for making such an heir accept his place in life.

Draco carried the book up to the counter. The smiling woman at the counter turned sour and pale when she saw him, and fussed over the book for longer than necessary. Draco thought he might actually leave the shop without her seeing it and questioning the title, she was so busy focusing on Draco's face.

Then she did happen to glance down at the book as she began to wrap it, and her fingers paused.

"What?" she whispered, looking up and into Draco's eyes. "So you lost your wife, and now you're going to put your son through the _heartless _training that this book recommends as well?" Her eyes were widening, and she had touched the counter as though she had some alarm spell there that would call out hidden assassins. "I won't let you!"

Her rising voice was attracting attention. Draco sighed and aimed his wand at her under the counter, quickly murmuring a Memory Charm. Her face relaxed into imbecility and confusion, and Draco rounded the counter and helped her sit down on the stool behind it. "Some kind of fit," he explained to the staring customers. "She'll be all right in a few minutes."

Most of them had already turned back to the shelves. Draco sneered under his breath. Some people persisted in hating him and his family, as this woman showed, but on the other hand, so many wizards were preoccupied with their own business since the war, not that many cared about him.

"What happened?"

Draco smiled and conjured a fan for the woman to hold, placing it in her hand. "I think you got overcome by the heat," he said. "It's very hot out today. And you came over all faint when you were wrapping up my book." Another quick wave of his wand finished the wrapping on the book himself. "Here's the coins."

The woman glanced back and forth between the package and the Galleons for a second. "Did the book really cost that much?" she asked doubtfully. "Did I—"

"Call it payment for the trouble that my face appears to have caused you," said Draco. She would forget the immediate occurrence, but it was asking for too much to hope that she would miraculously forget her hatred for Malfoys.

Her back straightened. "I don't want to overcharge even people I dislike."

"Think of it as the price for me clearing out quickly, then," Draco snapped, and picked up the book, and exited the shop. For Merlin's sake, people were divided between extreme ignoring of everything except their own concerns and then insistence on prying into what didn't concern them. Draco wasn't sure why he always seemed to run into the least convenient combination of the two.

He shook his head as he Apparated home. He had escaped without actual incident, and he had a book that promised to tell him what was wrong with Scorpius. He was about as happy as he could be, right now.

* * *

"_No!_"

Draco barely ducked the fork this time, and he didn't duck the plate of fish. It smashed into his head, and juices dripped down his face and slid into his ears and eyes. He cursed and flailed wildly at the plate, which flew across the room and broke into more pieces against the wall. A house-elf appeared, squeaking in distress, then vanished again when Draco stared at Scorpius.

Scorpius quieted as he looked at Draco, too, but his head went up, and that stubborn little line formed at the corner of his mouth. "I don't _like _fish," he said. "I'm not going to eat it. Not going, not going, not going—"

His voice was building up, and Draco cut in, hoping to avoid another temper. "That's fine, you don't have to eat the fish. I just served it because it's Grandfather's favorite fish, you know." One thing the book had suggested was putting the young pure-blood heir in touch with his ancestry by giving him food and toys and books that his ancestors had liked. So far, that was a failure with food that Draco and Narcissa had liked. Draco had hoped Lucius's tastes would match Scorpius's more closely.

From the way that Scorpius's eyes darkened, it wasn't working. "I want to eat biscuits," he said. "And chocolate. And milk and Muggle food and cheese and—"

Draco cringed at the "Muggle food," but tried to sound as calm as he could when he interrupted again. "You can have some of those things, some of the time. But you need to eat meat and fish and vegetables so that you can be strong and handsome. That's what you want, right? To be strong and handsome?"

"No," said Scorpius, and he was gasping in the way that meant he was near tears. "I want Mummy back!"

"She's not coming back," said Draco. He and Astoria had agreed on this from the beginning. Astoria said the same thing to Scorpius during her firecalls. Neither of them would ever lie to Scorpius or pretend that they were getting married again. "That's what you have to accept, Scorpius. She's happy where she is, and she wants you to be happy, too."

"Then she should _come back!_"

Scorpius shouted the last words, and Draco felt another drip of fish juice slide down his ear. He closed his eyes, his patience exhausted. "Go to your room, Scorpius," he said. "Izzy?" The house-elf appeared. "Escort Master Scorpius to his room, and then come back and clean up this mess, please."

Izzy looked at Draco so long and steadily that he thought she would disobey. House-elves could do that sometimes if they resented their owner's orders enough. Draco found himself holding his breath.

But in the end, Izzy turned away without doing it, and instead put a hand on Scorpius's wrist and escorted him towards his rooms, murmuring softly to him all the time. Draco didn't bother listening to what she said. He cast Cleaning Charms on himself and stared at the ruin of the dinner.

He had tried hard all day to play the games that Scorpius liked, and alternate those with activities that would give him a good sense of what it was like to be a Malfoy. They'd spent half an hour in the gallery where the portraits of past Malfoys hung, and they'd looked at albums that held photographs of the heirlooms, mostly locked up in the Gringotts vaults, that Scorpius would inherit someday. Draco had thought it was going well.

Then—this.

Draco stooped down, picked up a piece of plate shard, and tossed it against the wall after the rest of the plate, where it broke, violently. Then he turned and walked out of the room with as much dignity as he could muster.

* * *

That evening, sitting in front of the fire with a glass of the wine that had been the favorite of several of his ancestors, Draco found himself returning to one of Blaise's suggestions he had rejected in outrage at first.

Certainly, the thought of writing to the _Daily Prophet _and begging for advice was pathetic. Who knew whether the person who responded to him would even be a pure-blood, or have any experience raising children? Draco might get one of those pompous idiots who thought they knew better than parents precisely because they'd never been parents.

And he couldn't ask his mother and father. They had been against Draco and Astoria divorcing, even though it had been the best thing for the family in so many respects. Draco didn't want to listen to a lecture that would mostly consist of variations on, "I told you so."

But there were other routes he might seek advice by, and some of them were unexpected. Draco Summoned a book on post-owls from the library that he had read during the long days of his house arrest, awaiting trial, after the war, when the Aurors had cleared most of the interesting books from Malfoy Manor and left only the ones that not even the most suspicious bastard could qualify as Dark.

Yes. The section he had thought was most interesting, and so read over and over again, was the one that the book still automatically fell open at. It talked about the process of breeding post-owls and how the wizards who bred them had managed to instill some almost mystic qualities. The way an owl could find a wizard even if they didn't know their address. The way they could find even a Muggleborn student who had never been to Hogwarts and lived in the Muggle world.

The way that an owl could sometimes take a letter precisely to the person it needed to go to, if the writer's need was strong enough, even if the writer didn't know that that person existed.

Draco didn't think further. He Summoned ink and quill, and seized the parchment he already had on the desk beside him, and began to write.

_To whoever can help me,_

_Please help. I'm trying to raise my five-year-old son right after divorcing my wife, and although she sees him and talks to him regularly, my son is taking it very hard. He screams and breaks things, and won't eat food he needs to be healthy, and has regressed in his writing and learning abilities. I don't know how to raise him properly to be a pure-blood heir instead of the brat he's becoming. If you have a lot of experience raising children, then please inform me how to do it. If not, please pass the letter along to someone who does._

Draco hesitated, then signed it simply _M_. No point in embarrassing himself until he knew whether the letter would even get a reply.

Then he stood up and called for his owl, and sent the letter off before he could think better of it, telling the bird, "Take this to someone who can help me raise Scorpius."

For a second, the owl hesitated, and he feared it wouldn't work. Then the bird gave a single excited hoot and shot away, heading straight and true for the horizon.

Draco gave a limp sigh and collapsed back against his chair. He would just have to hope this bloody business would work.


	6. Reception

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Reception_

"But I want to go with you."

Teddy was leaning his head against Harry's leg and looking up at him with the most winsome expression Harry had ever seen. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Teddy was only eight. He knew enough about manipulation to be a teenager.

"I'm sure you do, but it's going to be fine," said Harry, and flicked his finger against Teddy's nose hard enough to make him cross his eyes a bit. "The Healer only has to see to my leg and make sure the injury healed properly. There's nothing you can do in St. Mungo's except get into mischief." He raised his eyebrows as Teddy blushed. "Unless you were going to tell me that it was your evil twin who smeared those potions all over the walls last time."

"I just wanted to see the colors they would make," Teddy muttered to his feet.

Harry patted his shoulder. "I know." After that, he had taken the hint that, he had to admit, Andromeda had also been trying to give him, and bought Teddy a fine set of paints. "But changing your face so that you look like a different boy and telling them that that evil Teddy Lupin just ran down the corridor isn't a good thing to do either."

Teddy flushed more deeply. Harry and Andromeda had tried to instill in him, as fast as possible, the fact that he had to be careful and responsible with his Metamorphmagus gifts, precisely because it would be so disastrous if he wasn't.

"Okay," he said. "Is that the real reason you aren't taking me along?"

"It is." Harry also wanted to say something about this being an absolutely routine appointment. The Healers had reassured him that he would walk without a limp again, although it would probably take several months of regular exercise to normalize the muscles in his leg. But what Teddy had got up to last time he was there would add a lot more weight.

"Okay," said Teddy again, and let Harry's hand go with a sigh. "You wouldn't take Hugo with you, though?"

_Ah. _Harry crouched down in front of Teddy. "You know that Rose and Hugo aren't more special to me than you are, right?" he whispered. "That I love you all the same?"

Teddy turned his eyes a deep, murky green, the way he usually did when he was feeling melancholy, and didn't answer.

Harry sighed, and glanced around Teddy's bedroom for inspiration. It was the biggest bedroom in Andromeda's house, the one that used to belong to Tonks when she was a girl. It had rocking chairs, dozens of moving toys on the floor and posters on the walls, some books on shelves that sagged because Teddy got the books down so often, and dark purple walls. Harry finally found what he was looking for, and Summoned the practice wand made of holly wood. "You know that I would never trust Rose or Hugo with this?"

"Well, yeah," said Teddy, picking up the wand and frowning down at it. "But that's just because they're little babies and I'm older."

"No, it's not," Harry said, and curled Teddy's fingers around the wand. "It's because Rose is a mischief-maker and Hugo's accidental magic is too wild. Even if they were your age, they would have to change a _lot _before I would trust them with a practice wand."

Teddy's chest visibly inflated. "So I'm not a mischief-maker?"

"You _listen_," said Harry dryly, thinking of last week, when Rose had spilled a huge bowl of soup in the kitchen, on purpose, and then run and slid through it so that she soaked all her clothes. When Ron had told her to stop, she did it again, also on purpose. Some of that was just her being three, but she was sure a lot more stubborn than Harry remembered Teddy being at the same age. "That's more than enough."

Teddy threw his arms around him. Harry bent over the bed and hugged him back, long and hard, then stood up and limped to the door.

"It's only temporary," he added, as he saw the way Teddy's eyes fixed worriedly on his leg. "I promise. And next time, I'll know to stay out of the way of a dragon's kick."

Teddy laughed and relaxed, lying back on his bed and twirling the practice wand. "If you're too long in hospital, I'll just Summon you back," he said, and pointed the wand at Harry. "Bang!"

Harry grinned. He had bought and trimmed a bit of phoenix feather to put inside Teddy's practice wand, so he could cast minor spells, but he was nowhere near the Summoning Charm yet. Even for the spells he _could _cast, he had to practice the wand movements and the incantation perfectly before they would work. "I'll appreciate that. Don't let the evil Healers keep me!"

Teddy laughed again, and Harry left, smiling at Andromeda on the way down, smiling all the way out.

His life wasn't perfect, but he'd had three years to get used to the fact that he couldn't have kids of his own, and he had to admit, Teddy and Rose and Hugo were all pretty good substitutes.

His leg twinged at him then, and he grimaced. Pain was _not _a good substitute for actually being able to walk. At least this shouldn't last too much longer.

* * *

"You're fine, Auror Potter."

The words still echoed in Harry's head, and probably his own wide smile, as he walked out of hospital and took in a deep breath of fresh air. He would still need all the exercise and regular appointments that Healer Sutcliffe had talked about, but at least the long regimen of lying in bed and taking potions all the time was done.

He stood there breathing in all the air that seemed so fresh and clean and pure, even given that he was in an alley behind St. Mungo's, and decided that he would Apparate to Diagon Alley and have dinner in the Leaky Cauldron to celebrate. He could probably catch up with Seamus and Dean there.

Harry had just lifted his wand to Apparate when he heard a soft hoot above him. He looked up, and lifted an arm as the owl came in for a landing. Harry snorted. He had long ago learned that most post-owls weren't as excitable as Pig, but neither were they as smart as Hedwig.

"What would have happened if I'd Apparated just then, huh?" he gently scolded the owl, running a finger along its back.

The owl gave him an unimpressed glance that seemed to convey it would have caught up easily, and then extended its leg. Harry took the letter, giving it a critical look as he did. It didn't have any writing on the outside, and when he opened it…

The strangest message.

For a long time, Harry stood there, reading it over and over. His first instinct was to dismiss it as a joke, but it was a strange sort of joke, if true. The rumors about his infertility never had leaked out to the press; as far as most people knew, he and Ginny had divorced because they'd started arguing all the time and their marriage wasn't perfect after all. So the chances that someone would have sent this to him as a prank were low.

And the owl perched on his shoulder and stared at him in the manner of an owl waiting for a reply, so whoever had written this wanted a regular correspondence.

Harry touched the bottom of the page. _M_. That could have meant anything, could have been the initial letter of a first or last name, could have indicated a place name or a pseudonym. Harry had to admit that he didn't really feel comfortable writing back as Harry Potter to someone who had kept his identity concealed.

_Why not write back as Ethan, then?_

The idea blossomed like the plants in Ethan's garden, and made Harry stand quite still.

On the one hand, it would be a little silly. He had never revealed Ethan's existence to anyone else. He kept the journal, and wrote in it almost daily, and it was a relief knowing that he could retreat to that other existence whenever he needed it. But writing Ethan's name down on a letter would make it a little real to at least one other person outside the journal. Harry didn't think he wanted to deal with the consequences of that.

On the other hand, this was a person he knew nothing about, except the extremely scanty details revealed in the letter. There was no reason they needed to know anything about him, either. And the owl had come to him because of the writer's intense need. Harry had heard of such things, and once seen it happen, with a fellow Auror who had received a letter from an escaped victim of a killer she was tracking. The victim hadn't known who was working the case or even that the wizard who had tried to kill him had murdered other people; he had just written the information about the attack on himself down and sent it out with a breathless plea for someone who could keep him safe from the killer. That had been one of the things that was crucial to solving the case, if Harry remembered it correctly.

What if he wrote back, and he was Ethan Starfall, experienced father with three children, speaking from the center of a settled and peaceful life?

Instead of what he was, which was someone who had a lot more experience with children now than he'd had three years ago, but none of his own? The letter-writer would probably be upset at the idea that he was getting advice from someone who hadn't been a parent.

Harry tucked the letter up and went home—his own flat now, not Dean's—where he sat down in front of the window. The owl had come with him and fluttered around the room aimlessly for a moment before it saw the perch Harry kept for visiting birds and settled on it. Harry Summoned him a bowl of water and owl treats, and turned back to the blank parchment.

Ethan's voice was never far away from him when he was in front of paper like this, and soon it came flooding in.

_Dear "M,"_

_It feels a little distant and cold to call you that, but okay, I can do it. I should let you know that my name is Ethan Starfall and I have three children, so I do have a lot of experience with raising kids. But I'm not pure-blood, as you could probably tell from my family name. I don't know if that will make a difference to you or not. Take my advice with as much skepticism as you want._

_It sounds like what's hitting your son the hardest is your divorce. I haven't been through a divorce myself, but I have friends who have, and it's a tough thing for a child. I wouldn't advise you and your wife getting back together, of course. That would ultimately give him false hope. You should strive to be honest with him._

_Is he the kind of child who would respond well to being treated like an adult? Sit down and tell him as much as you can of the reasons that you and your wife divorced. That will make him feel important and included. That was important for our eldest son when it turned out that he had inherited some magic not many people in our family had. He was afraid that he was adopted, and my wife, Anne, and I had to spend some time talking about inheritances and showing him family trees where other magical gifts skipped generations to calm him down. Some of our friends said the subject was too complicated for him. But we took the time and had the patience to include him, and that was the best solution all round._

Harry smiled as he wrote. He could see Ethan sitting on the couch with James and going through family trees. It was the sort of weird, sweet thing that Ethan would do. He was enthusiastic about _everything _he did, and there was no end to those sweet, weird things. Harry knew that Ethan was not only the person he would have liked to be, but a person he would have liked to live beside.

_Or is he the kind of child who needs more attention to himself and his personality and likes and dislikes? I know that you said you want to raise him as a proper pure-blood heir, but he might be a little young for that. Try talking to him and figuring out what he most wants to be doing. Then, if it isn't dangerous or too mischievous, try doing it with him. That might reassure him that you really care about him, and not just about raising him as your heir._

Harry hesitated over those lines, and then shrugged. It was true. Ethan thought blood purity was absolutely idiotic, and was grateful that his parents had taken him out of the country in the war so that he never needed to deal with someone who believed that shit. And all M had to do was not write to him again if he found Ethan's advice useless.

_Either way, I don't think I can give you more of an idea unless you give me more details. It sounds to me like you're alone with your son a majority of the time, and it's driving you crazy. Is there anyone else you can reach out to? Other children he can play with? Other adults that he likes and admires that you could leave him with for a while? A holiday might be good for both of you._

Harry signed Ethan's name with a flourish, and then turned to the owl. For a moment, he was a bit nervous. It was true that the owl had brought the letter straight to him even though this mysterious M had only reached out for someone who could help him. Would the owl know who Harry was, now, and refuse to carry a letter that had a false name on it? Maybe the owl was really smart.

But the owl snatched the letter and flew straight out the window as though it couldn't wait to be away. Out of investigator's habit, Harry watched it fly and tried to make out what direction it went in, but he couldn't really tell.

He stood there for a few seconds, thinking about it, and then shrugged and smiled. He could hear from M again, or he might not. He probably wouldn't. If raising a proper pure-blood heir was that important to M, then he would recoil the instant he realized that he didn't recognize the name.

That had fulfilled Harry's impulse to visit Ethan's life for the night, so he limped into the kitchen to make himself dinner. At the moment, simple food heated up by the Muggle microwave he'd bought a year ago sounded good.

* * *

"Who's the letter from?"

It was the first interest Scorpius had shown in anything but shrieking and pounding the walls in almost a day. Draco glanced up with a faint smile.

"It's from a friend I wrote to to ask about how to help you," Draco said. It was maybe damaging to be this honest with Scorpius, but just talking to him in the way that Draco's parents had talked to him, and concealed things from him, wasn't working. Draco hoped that the letter contained some suggestions about honesty.

Scorpius scowled at him. "I don't need help." And he turned and stomped out of the library, where the owl had found Draco.

Draco sighed and summoned Izzy to feed the owl as much as its portly little stomach could carry, then went back upstairs. He was exhausted, dealing with his son. He was more than half-tempted to give Scorpius over to his parents after all. At least that would mean he had a holiday of sorts.

Then he opened the letter, and the name struck him like a blow to the gut.

_That bloody bird found a Muggleborn?_

Draco contemplated throwing the letter in the fire instead of reading it. It was important to him that Scorpius be raised with some recognition of his name and heritage and what they meant, and what they didn't mean. He didn't think a Muggleborn could understand that. At the very least, they would probably write a letter full of patronizing advice about how he should take Scorpius out and expose him to Muggle culture.

_At the moment, he has Muggle culture enough on the brain already, _Draco thought. Scorpius had never actually ventured into Muggle London or seen much Muggle technology or eaten Muggle food, but he had decided they must be wonderful because they were the opposite of what his dad was currently trying to make him see or use or eat.

But the owl had gone to someone who could help. If the request to the bird worked at all, Draco didn't think that it would seek out someone who was the opposite of everything he stood for.

So, in the end, he read the letter, but he read it holding it a distance from himself, ready to dash it down and disown it in seconds if it turned out not to be what he wanted.

Instead, it was frank and open and engaging, and showed a distrust of him that Draco couldn't help but commend. Merlin knew that he would be suspicious if some letter showed up out of the blue and gave him the outlines of a situation with a plea for suggestions.

This Ethan Starfall, though…

He'd taken the time to write back. He didn't sound as though he really understood everything about Scorpius and the way that Draco wanted to raise him, but Draco hadn't given him that much to go on, either.

Draco traced a thoughtful finger down the edge of the letter. He hadn't thought of talking to Scorpius exactly like an adult, mostly because that seemed to not succeed at all since Astoria had left. Scorpius acted more childish than ever.

But if he was feeling neglected, perhaps he would. Draco decided that tomorrow, he would try a day without lessons or reminders of what Scorpius's ancestors would have thought of his behavior. He would, instead, talk to Scorpius about the white peacocks in the gardens and explain why his grandfather liked them.

Decision made, Draco tucked the letter away. He didn't know if he would write back to Starfall yet, but it looked likely.

* * *

"Can you understand why Grandfather likes them?"

Scorpius, his hand clutched in Draco's so that he wouldn't rush forwards and grab the peacock's tail, simply shook his head. He had his thumb in his mouth again, too. Draco had read that that would deform his teeth, and tried to stop him from doing it, but he wouldn't.

Draco held back a sigh. If he showed that he was upset with Scorpius, then the situation would follow the same track as it had the other days. Scorpius would scream back at him and stomp off somewhere, and the instant he got his hands on something fragile, it would shatter.

"He likes them because they're graceful," Draco said, keeping his voice low. The white peacocks tolerated him more than they had Lucius, probably because Draco didn't go strolling out among them as often. But they were still nervous and prone to either run away or shriek in their piercing voices. "He wanted reminders of grace around him. He went to prison for a while when I was a baby, you know. When he got out, he decided that he would have as much beauty around him as possible."

"Grandfather went to _prison_?"

Draco started and looked at Scorpius. It had been impossible to hide knowledge of Azkaban from him completely, since he had heard Draco and Astoria talking about it and asked what it was, but Draco supposed, now, that he had never told Scorpius completely about Lucius and his activities in the first war.

He thought of changing the subject, but Scorpius had taken his thumb out of his mouth. And some of Ethan's sentences rang in his head. _That will make him feel important and included._

This wasn't about Draco's divorce from his mum, but maybe peacocks could be a start.

"Yes," said Draco. "Grandfather fought in a war, and he was on the wrong side of the war. The Ministry put him in prison until they decided what to do with him. Then he explained to them what happened, and they let him out."

Scorpius paused. "Why?" he finally settled on, the question he had plagued Draco and Astoria with every day.

Draco took a deep breath. He had made even that explanation too simple, and he would have to be completely clear and see what happened. "He said that he was being controlled by someone else. There's a spell—called the Imperius Curse—that can make you do things you don't want to do."

"You could use it to send me to bed?" Scorpius scowled at him.

"I won't ever cast it on you," Draco said, and Scorpius blinked, apparently impressed by the way Draco said that.

"Okay. Did they use it on Grandfather?"

"The Ministry believed him when he said that he had been controlled. They let him out of prison, and he came back home and got the peacocks."

Scorpius looked around. He knew that his grandparents had lived in the Manor before they decided to let Draco and Scorpius have it completely, because they believed the next Malfoy heir needed to grow up here and see his father being independent. But Draco couldn't tell from the look in his eyes what he was thinking.

"I want lunch."

Draco relaxed. He had wondered if Scorpius would ask more about the war, or whether Lucius had _really _been under the Imperius Curse, and Draco didn't think that was a conversation either one of them was ready to have. "All right. What do you want?"

"I get to choose?"

_When did I stop letting him do that? _Draco distinctly remembered Scorpius choosing dinner sometimes when he and Astoria were still married, and he had thought it had happened since then, too. But it seemed not.

"Yes," said Draco, deciding that he was going to be as gracious as possible. "What do you want?"

"Boiled cod!" Scorpius took off running for the Manor.

Draco followed, relaxation pouring like oil over his body. This was the first full afternoon they had got through without a temper tantrum in…well, forever.

He did write back to Starfall that night, and he began his letter, _Dear Ethan._


	7. A Collection of Letters

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Seven—A Collection of Letters_

When the next letter came, Harry was lying in bed with his leg stretched in front of him and his arms strapped down. He _knew _he shouldn't have scratched that hard at what had originally been a small sting, but how was he supposed to know that it would explode in his face and scatter evil-smelling goo everywhere?

The letter was delivered by the same owl as before, but this time, Harry opened it a lot more eagerly. Someone else in the world knew who Ethan was, and found him convincing enough to respond to. Harry could feel his heartbeat picking up and the prick of sweat on his palms.

_Dear Ethan, _it began, and Harry rested his head against the pillow and savored that beginning for a long second.

Then, curious, he went to the signature, wondering if it would still be the single letter M, only to be confronted by the name _Draco Malfoy._

Harry sat there with his mouth hanging open a little, and then he tipped his head back and began to whoop in laughter.

"Mate?" Ron was walking into his hospital room, carrying Rose. Each evening he or Hermione visited, usually with one of the kids in tow. Ron had been looking at Rose as if he expected her to climb out of his arms and go mad with every object in the room any second, but now, Harry was the one who got that stare. "Is something wrong?"

Harry thought of trying to explain the joke, but that would mean explaining Ethan, and he thought he might see uncomfortable pity in Ron's eyes. Probably not, but _possibly_, and it meant that he didn't really want to tell the truth.

"A strange fan letter," he said, and shook his head, and put the letter underneath his pillow. "What's my favorite girl doing here?" Hermione had brought Rose just yesterday, so it should have been Hugo's turn.

Rose laughed and held out her arms. "Hi, Uncle Harry! I maded a big cake." And then she started telling him a story about a crocodile that Harry found it hard to follow, the way that most of Rose's stories were. One had to just listen and enjoy the experience, as best as one could.

For the first time since Rose had started talking, though, Harry listened to her with only half his attention. He really wanted to get away and continue reading that letter. He woke up only when Rose fell asleep abruptly on his shoulder, and Ron dragged a chair up to the foot of the bed and sat down with a significant look at Harry.

"Yeah, what?" Harry asked, keeping his voice low because of the sleeping child he was holding. Maybe Ron would do the same thing, or at least refrain from yelling the way that he looked as if he'd like to do.

"This is the second time you've wound up in hospital in two months, mate," Ron began, and his voice was low in the way that Harry had last heard it when they were talking about Harry's divorce from Ginny. "I have to wonder if you're—depressed, or taking risks, because of that news we got." He gave Harry another meaningful look that, this time, Harry had to admit he didn't know how to read.

"What news?" Harry rocked Rose as she sighed and shifted in her sleep, and felt a soft protectiveness rise up in his stomach. No, she would never be his blood daughter, but he would fight as hard to defend her as he would have for his blood children if it was still possible for him to have them. "No, really, just raising your eyebrows at me isn't going to tell me what you mean."

Ron sighed hard enough to blow one of the potions vials on the table beside Harry's bed back and forth. "That news about Ginny being pregnant."

"Oh!" said Harry, with a blankness that Ron didn't find convincing, if the way his eyebrows rose was any indication. Harry shook his head. "Honestly, I wasn't thinking about it. I can't say that I'm completely happy for her, but at least I'm happy enough not to be an arsehole about it." And even then, he thought, his lingering bad feelings came mostly from thinking that Michael Corner, Ginny's new husband, was the man she had been planning to sleep with and have sire her children when she and Harry were still together.

"Then why haven't you been paying attention to things?" Ron demanded. "First a dragon kicks you because you stupidly get in the way, and now magically-created wasps? And always to your leg!"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Because I was focused on other things instead. Like getting those kids away from the dragon, and the Killing Curse that that last insane idiot was shooting at my _partner and best friend._"

Ron at least had the sense to look abashed there. As he should, Harry thought, having stumbled into an ambush that he'd been deliberately left out of and ruining it. Harry loved Ron, a lot of the other Aurors in the Department liked working with him, but subtle he was not. "Fine. Then—then you're going to be all right with seeing Ginny and her kid and Michael a few times at parties and holidays?"

"It'll take a while for me to be completely fine, but I won't go up and start yelling at them," said Harry. "Just don't suggest that I be godfather to her kids or anything like that."

"You're already godfather to three of them," said Ron, and looked at Rose, still asleep against Harry's neck although kicking and shifting her legs in a way that indicated she was probably ready to wake up and wreak havoc again. "I don't think you'll any more time for godfatherly duties if we give you another one!"

"If you and Hermione have another one, it would be my honor," Harry said, and caught Ron's eyes for a moment, and made him be serious. "You know that."

Ron snorted and shook his head, almost hiding the flash of delight that danced through his eyes. "We appreciate that, but we're not going to have another one, I'm pretty sure. Two has us stretched as it is." He reached out and flicked a thumb softly against Rose's heel. "So, when are you going to be battle-ready again?"

The conversation drifted, and Harry allowed it to. But all the time, he thought of Malfoy's letter under his pillow, and he probably paid a little less attention to the conversation and to Rose and Ron leaving than he otherwise would. He did listen to make sure their footsteps had faded before he took it out, though.

Not because he feared what they would say about him hearing from Malfoy. It was Ethan's existence he thought they would object to.

_Dear Ethan,_

_I have to admit that I hesitated when I saw your name. I wasn't sure that someone who wasn't from a recognized pure-blood family could tell me the proper way to bring up a pure-blood heir._

Harry scowled mildly. If the whole letter was like that, he would have to change the good opinion of Malfoy he was forming.

_But then I realized that I'm too desperate to refuse help. I read your letter and tried to apply the advice. It worked. Talking to Scorpius about things that his grandfather had done and letting him choose his dinner were small and simple things, but they made him happier than anything has made him since the divorce._

Harry put a hand over his mouth. The mediwitches had shown an alarming tendency to burst into his room if he made any sound at all, apparently under the belief that he must be suffering from some kind of wound and there were lots of people who wanted to assassinate him. He had to muffle his snorts of incredulous laughter at the name.

_Scorpius Malfoy!_

After that had gone on for a while, Harry shook his head and continued reading. He supposed that some people would find the names he had chosen for Ethan's children stupid, too, especially the middle ones, but at least he had never shown anyone else those names.

_It's difficult. I'm having a certain degree of trust in you by revealing this, but now that I've written Scorpius's name and I want more of your advice, it was inevitable in any case. And I want to know if you will continue to write once you know who I am. I would like to know what I can do to talk about the divorce to Scorpius in more detail. My wife and I parted because it bored us to be together. How does one explain that to a five-year-old?_

Then came the signature _Draco Malfoy, _done with the same sort of flowing grandeur that Harry had seen Malfoy use in school.

Harry leaned back with his lip curling a little. They were _bored_? What a reason to abandon a marriage.

But he wasn't sure that trying to explain the story of his own divorce to Malfoy would go well, either. Malfoy would probably tell him to cast a Confundus Charm on Ginny and then take her into the Muggle world and have her artificially inseminated anyway.

_Why am I thinking about that? Malfoy's never going to know that it's me, anyway. He wouldn't trust me, and I won't betray my secret or Ginny's. It's Ethan he's going to get to know._

Luckily, the mediwitches didn't think he was too weak to write letters or that they had to intercept and inspect them. Harry picked up the quill and parchment he needed, and called for ink. He was excited to write back, with Ethan's emotions and not his own stirring in him. Ethan could see even Draco Malfoy as an object of compassion, and understand the reason for his marriage ending like that, because Ethan had a bigger heart than Harry dd.

_Dear Draco (I hope I can call you that?)…._

* * *

_The question you asked is difficult. But if you've explained a few hard things to your son already, then this should come easier. One thing I would emphasize is that your wife and you didn't divorce because of _him, _because she was bored of being his mother or you didn't want to raise him anymore. That would be deadly, if he started believing that._

_Maybe build up to the subject gradually? Talk about your ex-wife, if you can bear to, and it sounds like you can. Show him photographs from the years you were together, and see if he asks about the expression on her face, if he can see the boredom for himself. If he doesn't, then you might tell him the good things about his mum and encourage him to talk about her, too, and show how happy she is with her life now (I assume she is). It would probably help him to see that his parents are happy._

Draco's eyebrows rose, and he leaned back on the couch. This Ethan Starfall had better advice than Draco would have thought. It was an even chance that he only knew a few things about kids and had got the advice right in his first letter by lucky coincidence. Even then, Draco wasn't sure how much someone who had never been divorced and apparently lived in a disgustingly happy marriage would be able to tell him about raising a son.

A lot, it seemed.

_We had to do this with our daughter, recently. She had been getting more and more unhappy, and we honestly didn't know why. She gets most everything she wants (I'm willing to admit that we're more relaxed with her than the others, since she's younger and by the time we had her we both knew that we hadn't made any horrible mistakes with the older two). But it didn't seem to content her the way it had. Her mother talked to her, thinking it might be something more common to girls than boys, but it wasn't that._

_It turned out that she'd seen how we were getting unhappy with some of her behavior in shops. She used to ask for things, and we'd buy them for her without hesitation. But as she's got older, she wants more expensive toys, ones that we don't think she needs. So we buy them for her, but I reckon we were pausing more often and acting more unhappy about it._

_We didn't even know we were doing it. We didn't know she'd noticed. So we talked about it, and she agreed to ask a little less and not throw tantrums when she didn't get something she wanted. Not that she ever had thrown many, but those were so bad that Anne and I were holding back and flinching and not wanting to refuse to by her something in case she had one._

_We were both being dishonest with each other, without realizing it. And it took some time to work out what was going on, because Lily can't be as articulate with us as I can be for her, of course! But then it was there, and we'll all been happier since._

_So maybe try that with your son. Emphasize your own happiness, and hers, and he's more likely to settle down and grow up comfortable. And emphasize that he was in no way the cause of the divorce._

_Yours,_

_Ethan._

Draco laid the letter down and looked towards the corridor that led to Scorpius's wing. The letter had come early enough that he wasn't up yet, and Draco was having a small breakfast of scones and tea. He turned back to the fireplace and tore up a scone absentmindedly, his mind alive with all sorts of thoughts.

They already had done their best to reassure Scorpius that he was beloved, and safe, and happy. That _they _were happy, maybe, Draco corrected himself a second later. He had to admit that when he was Scorpius's age, he wouldn't have taken reassurance that he really was happy when he knew himself not to be at all well.

Ethan had a daughter named Lily. Two older sons. A blissful marriage. Draco wouldn't say that he envied him, not exactly, not when Ethan was Muggleborn and Draco wasn't, but at least he had an interesting life, and not a disrupted one.

And at least this gave him a legitimate reason to firecall Astoria. She would be awake. She said that she found the nights and the early mornings the best time for working on fruitful projects, while she slept during the lazy light of afternoon.

Draco cast some Floo powder in and called, "General Morgana's office!" Astoria was calling her company General Morgana, after one of the most powerful witches in legend, who had influenced the political destiny of England. It was a testament to the impact that she intended her inventions to have on the wizarding world.

It took some doing before the faces of Astoria's subordinates disappeared from the fireplace and Astoria herself appeared. She curled her lip a little when she saw him, the sure sign that he had interrupted her in the middle of one of her projects. "Yes?" she asked curtly.

Draco sighed, and tried to control the paralyzing ennui that was creeping over him merely from looking at Astoria. It had gone from being bored dancing with her and sleeping with her, to being bored when she talked about the things she wanted to invent, to being bored by the sight of her. That probably wasn't healthy, but then again, he wasn't sure he cared.

"I know that you want to help me raise Scorpius the way we should," he said. "Well, lately he's been acting like a brat."

Astoria's lip uncurled. "How?" Even though Scorpius didn't bear her last name, she would take any transgressions against the pure-blood image Draco was raising him in seriously. And she would know that Draco didn't use the word "brat" lightly.

"Throwing things against the wall. Screaming when he doesn't get his way. Trying to tear down his curtains. He even refused to have dinner with Blaise." Draco eyed her, and made sure that she was still listening instead of opening her mouth to comment on the way that Draco was raising their son. She looked calm. Good. "I find an adviser who told me that Scorpius is taking the divorce badly, and that we need to emphasize that we're happier this way and he wasn't the cause."

Astoria considered that as deeply as she had considered Draco's plan for them to divorce, at least if the way her hand rose to touch her head was any indication. Then she nodded. "I can visit to help you with that. Or I can bring Scorpius here if you think that would work."

"It's better if you come here." On Scorpius's last visit to General Morgana's offices, he had talked about the inventions, but not about any time spent with his mum. Draco knew Astoria could get more involved in her work than Scorpius's life, pretty easily, but that was the opposite of what they should be trying to do right now.

"Very well," Astoria murmured, her voice going clipped. "I'll be by this afternoon, then."

"No," Draco said, strongly enough that Astoria stopped and stared at him. "I don't want you showing up in the middle of what should be your naptime and giving less than your full attention to Scorpius because of that. Come tonight. Better later than not focused on him."

For a second, he thought Astoria was going to challenge his characterization of her, but then she tipped her head to the side. "Very well. I'll see you at perhaps eight tonight?"

"That will work," Draco told her. Normally, Scorpius would be on the verge of going to bed by then, but Draco would relax the restrictions so he could spend time with his mum.

Astoria disappeared from the fireplace, and Draco stretched and sighed and stood up. He had a lot to do before he could fully apply all of Ethan's advice, and making the rooms Astoria would stay in comfortable for her was only part of it.

"Daddy?"

Draco blinked and turned rapidly. Scorpius stood in the doorway of the library behind him, his thumb in his mouth again. Draco controlled his automatic irritation at the sight, and nodded. "Yes, Scorpius, what is it?"

"Is Mummy coming because she wants to?"

Caught off-guard, Draco said the first thing that came to mind. "She's coming for you."

Scorpius's eyes widened. Draco wondered what he was thinking. In the old days, before Astoria departed, he used to think that he understood his son well, far better than most of the pure-blood parents trying to raise their children formally understood them. But now he thought that he must only have understood the simple things, the childish things on the surface of Scorpius's mind.

"I can stay here?" Scorpius whispered.

"Oh, yes," Draco said, and knelt down and reached out his arms. Scorpius came a few steps towards him, and then stopped and looked at his face. Draco remembered the time when Scorpius would have rushed forwards, but if he had to sacrifice a shallow understanding for a deeper one, that was what he would do. He forced himself not to simply drop his hands. "She's coming to visit you, to show you that she's happy."

"Happy?" Scorpius popped his thumb back into his mouth.

"Scorpius," Draco said, flinching as he did, because speaking this openly felt like peeling back a layer that had protected him from the outside world. "We didn't divorce because of you. Both of us want you to be happy, you know. We're happier now. We thought you would be, too."

Scorpius again stood there, saying nothing. Draco held his arms out until they started to tremble, with no notion if he was making the right decision or not. He had never felt so vulnerable.

Finally, Scorpius wandered forwards and leaned his head on Draco's shoulder. Draco let out a cautious breath and reached for him, moving slowly so that Scorpius could get away if he wanted to. But it seemed he didn't want to, and Draco finally held him and cradled him, almost rocking him. Scorpius sighed and said, "Sometimes I'm happy." It sounded like one of those simple facts Draco had thought he knew about his son.

Draco was determined not to take those simple facts for granted this time. "I want you to be happy _all _the time," he said. "Can you tell me when you're not?"

Silence, until he thought that he would be relegated to asking every hour. Then Scorpius's head moved against his in the barest of nods.

Draco leaned back against the fireplace and sat there holding his son until both their stomachs rumbled. It was the most precious, uninterrupted time he had had with Scorpius in months, and by the end, he didn't even care how silly he probably looked.

* * *

_Dear Ethan,_

_You were right about working with my son to show him that we were happier than he'd realized. I don't think that he was as happy as I assumed, but if he's growing towards that now, then I'm content._

_My ex-wife came for a visit tonight. She lives in France and works there, but she agreed to sacrifice some of her time to make the Floo journey. If you knew her, you would realize that is a sacrifice, although I suppose it doesn't sound like it to someone with as happy a marriage as you have. She was able to tell Scorpius that she didn't stop being his mum, which was something I hadn't even realized he was worried about._

_Scorpius is behaving a little better. He still screamed when I asked him to clean up his room, but he ate a lunch he didn't choose, and he went to bed right after his mother spoke with him. I think this might work. I can't believe that you were able to offer me such good advice—someone my owl went to on a chance. And I think that this might be harder when I start training Scorpius more the way a pure-blood heir should be trained, because those ways aren't the same as Muggle or Muggleborn ideals. But for now, I have to thank you._

_The best way of thanking you, to me, would be explained if we could meet. Do you live closer to London or to Hogsmeade?_

_Sincerely,_

_Draco Malfoy._

Harry snorted at the last words and shook his head. Malfoy was getting a little pushy, wasn't he? He didn't even know if Ethan was someone he'd be partial to in person, and he wanted to _meet _him?

It was impossible, of course. Harry had never developed a glamour that would allow him to pass as Ethan Starfall, and he never would. It would be dishonest. He supposed that writing letters to Malfoy could be seen as dishonest, too, but at least the advice was real, and helping. Otherwise, Ethan was going to stay in the pages of his journal, Harry's private game and pretense. If Malfoy got too insistent, then Ethan would just melt away. It wasn't as though Harry had left any trace of his existence in the wizarding world, not when he hadn't ever mentioned Ethan to the outside world before.

He picked up a piece of parchment and began to write.

_Dear Draco,_

_I'm very glad that your son is learning that you do love him and care about his happiness, and that his mother does, too. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a child going through the pains of divorce, but I know he needs you._

_I don't think meeting would be a good idea for a number of reasons…_


	8. Ethan a Mystery

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—Ethan a Mystery_

_ …I know that you want to meet me, and I feel flattered by that, but I have to admit, I'm a little put off by the way that you keep referring to pure-blood heritage and ideologies in all the letters that you send me. Are you going to despise me when we meet face-to-face and you see that I really am an undistinguished half-blood? I read an article a few years ago that talked about the features you can recognize pure-blood wizards by, and I don't have any of them. Not the aquiline nose or the deep-set eyes or the high forehead or the special way that you speak._

_I'm glad I can help you with your son. I think certain advice can cross all sorts of boundaries and touch the hearts of different people. But I won't set myself up to confront someone who will despise me on sight._

_Another thing I would tell you about Scorpius: see if he can understand the difference between temporary and lasting happiness, like the temporary happiness he gets out of flinging his dishes at the wall, and the lasting happiness that he gets from being with you and his mum. My own elder son understood the distinction a lot younger than I had thought he would._

_Yours, _

_Ethan._

"You don't usually frown that hard over a letter, Draco."

Draco looked up absently as Astoria came into the room, her robes flowing behind her. She wore the same robes that she had when they were married, he saw, pale green ones that he supposed she thought complemented her coloring. She had always claimed to be too busy to buy new ones. That failure to keep up a certain standard had been part of what bored Draco about her.

Draco decided that he might as well tell her about Starfall. She didn't care enough to mock him for it, or to spread the news as gossip. "It's a letter from the man who's been advising me about Scorpius. I invited him to meet me. He says he doesn't want to meet someone who holds to pure-blood standards."

"He sounds intelligent." Astoria sat down and reached for the marmalade.

Draco reared back. Lack of standards or not, that hadn't been at all the response he thought he would get from Astoria. "What? Then you think that I shouldn't be rearing Scorpius by pure-blood standards, either?"

"It's one thing for people who were raised to it, and take to it, the way you did," Astoria said, pausing to stare at him. "It's another for people who were never raised to it, the way you say this man wasn't, and for people who were raised to it and for whom it didn't take." She pointed a silent finger at her own chest, then went back to spreading the marmalade.

Draco shook his head. This was something he had forgotten about Astoria, or never known. At the moment, he couldn't remember which. He only knew that it was annoying that Ethan would judge him like this, when Draco had simply spoken his thoughts straight out, and not said anything about what would matter to him in an adviser.

"But if he doesn't want to meet with me, why does he keep writing to me?" Draco asked.

He had meant to muse aloud, but Astoria answered him as if she thought the question was directed at her. "Perhaps he wants to help with Scorpius, whatever he thinks of you. Does he seem to love children?"

"Yes," said Draco shortly. And Ethan did. Or perhaps Draco should think of him as Starfall, since the man was so prickly and unfriendly.

_Seriously, I never said anything about wanting him to have an aquiline nose._

"Well, then." Astoria moved the sleeve of her robe delicately out of the way of the marmalade that spread in an orange flood over her bread. "He might want Scorpius to be happy, and not you."

Draco winced and slumped back in his chair. That stung more than Astoria could know. Draco didn't think he had many close friends, except for Blaise, and his parents when they were on speaking terms. Sometimes he saw Pansy, but not usually for much more than a few hours of gossip before Pansy was rushing off to her efforts to prove that a new breed of dragons existed in far northern Finland.

_Why do all the women I know have ambition to work outside of the home, and I'm the only one who has the ambition to work inside it, at raising children? That's the most important thing you can do!_

Maybe that was another reason Ethan's rejection stung, Draco had to acknowledge. Because he had seemed to be a man like Draco, who spent all his time thinking about children and the future and how to make sure that the children _became _that future, but he still wanted to separate himself from Draco and make a different kind of life.

_Maybe you shouldn't place such dependence on the friendship of a man you haven't ever met._

But that was the kind of thing Draco wouldn't admit to anyone in his life. Blaise would laugh his head off. The others weren't even possibilities.

Astoria finished gnawing her bread and stood up. "I should be returning to the lab."

Draco narrowed his eyes. "I thought you would at least say goodbye to Scorpius before you went."

"I talked to him a lot yesterday," said Astoria, shaking her head. "He knew to expect me gone when he woke up this morning."

"You care more about your career than about him," Draco said.

"I care more about my career than about _raising _him," Astoria corrected him. "And that, dear Draco, is a large part of the reason he's with me and not you." She paused delicately. "Another reason is that when I did try to introduce him to inventions and magic that would improve those inventions, you said I shouldn't."

"Scorpius is never going to have to work for a living. He doesn't need to know about those things."

"You problems run too deep for this half-blood to help you with," Astoria said, and walked out of the breakfast room.

Draco cursed, kicked the leg of a chair, and then felt uncomfortably childish—which was probably exactly the way Astoria had meant to make him feel.

At least it was a few more minutes until Scorpius woke up and wandered into the kitchen with a bleary look on his face, which gave Draco some more time to think about how he was going to respond to Ethan, and what they were going to do today.

Scorpius sat down in Astoria's chair and said, "Butter!" It promptly appeared on the table, and Scorpius hooted gleefully and grabbed it.

Draco watched him eat, slathering his scones with butter that he had long since learned both to spread himself and to restrict to an appropriate amount. There was no way that Draco was going to tolerate his child slobbering over butter and only eating it instead of actual food, but on the other hand, he didn't want to deprive Scorpius of one of his own pleasures.

_This is a child who'll never have to work. This is a child who only has to meet people who aren't pure-blood at Hogwarts, unless he wants to make the effort to seek them out._

Given that, the way that Astoria had talked about raising Scorpius just wasn't feasible. But it still didn't give Starfall the right to decide that Draco was prejudiced against someone who had helped him, all without meeting him. What could Starfall be going on, anyway? The reports of Draco's crimes during the war, by now more than a decade old? Starfall had bragged about avoiding all the prejudice, but he had taken in some of it after all.

Draco's mouth firmed. He would write back to Ethan and let him have it. If Ethan couldn't stand that, then Draco would know he was better off without him. He had enough advice about Scorpius to be going on with, anyway.

If he _could _sting Ethan and make him reconsider meeting Draco, though…

He might try it. There was no way to be sure it would work, but simply giving up and letting what Ethan and Astoria had said rankle with him and seem true was _not _an option.

"Daddy!"

Draco blinked and looked up. Scorpius had one butter-covered thumb in his mouth and was staring at him.

_He's waiting for me to react, _Draco realized, in the moment before he caught sight of the butter dripping down Scorpius's sleeve and wanted to react anyway. But he didn't want to reward negative acts with attention. That wasn't the sort of thing a pure-blood parent would do.

A pure-blood parent was what he was, in spite of the efforts of other people to change him.

"I'm displeased, Scorpius," he said, in the calm voice that he knew used to drive Scorpius wild when Draco and Astoria still lived with each other. "Now you've made more work for the house-elves, and you'll have to have a bath before Blaise comes and takes you to see the unicorns they have in that children's park."

Scorpius immediately sat up, his eyes wide. "I don't want a _bath!_"

"But you have to." Draco gestured to the butter on Scorpius's clothes again. "You don't think that Uncle Blaise will want to go anywhere with someone who looks like that? Who's so dirty all the time? I know he won't."

"I don't care," said Scorpius, and his lip was sticking out in a way that Draco despised for the way that it disfigured his face, but also knew was probably useless to try and stop. "And Uncle Blaise won't care!"

Draco let his own careful silence answer that. Scorpius knew what Blaise was like, and while Blaise would smile and joke and not make Scorpius take a bath, he would also refuse to be seen in public with him. He would just sit at home with Scorpius and play with him until Scorpius either changed his mind or Blaise felt he'd spent enough time with him.

Scorpius slammed his plate on the table and stood up. Draco let him make it to the doorway before he spoke up, his voice as gentle and polite as before. "True pure-blood heirs are never small and petty like that."

Scorpius hunched his shoulders, but didn't turn around and snap at Draco the way he would have only a few days before. He just walked through the door and shut it behind him.

In its own way, Draco knew, that was as pointed an answer as he could have made by shouting. Draco didn't much care. He was smiling as he picked up Ethan's letter. He _could _parent on his own, and if Ethan insisted on abandoning him, then he wouldn't be much worse off.

* * *

Harry winced and looked at the letter on the table from Malfoy, then looked away again. He had read it, but he had been tired, finally released from hospital and working late and long to make up for paperwork he was behind on, and he had flung the letter away from him in a frenzy of impatience at its content. So he hadn't replied yet, and Malfoy's owl was growing dust on its talons as it crouched on the perch he had for visiting birds and hooted disapprovingly at him.

Harry finally sighed and picked up the letter again, wondering if he had misread what so irritated him.

_Dear Starfall, as perhaps I should call you since you want some formal distance between us,_

_Do you think that the appearance of another wizard matters to me? Why would I have suggested meeting you, if it did? I knew from the first who you were; you took enough care to announce it. I haven't disdained your advice. I applied it, and it works. For me, competence in the actions of someone I asked for help matters more than their blood._

Harry tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk where he kept a pile of the books that Hermione was always giving him as presents and stared out the high window the owl had flown through once before. All right, not as offensive as he had thought. Although he still resented Malfoy's way of speaking as though Harry was an employee he'd hired, one who currently wasn't giving satisfaction.

But that wasn't the same as hating and despising him because of his blood. Harry had had Ethan adopt the tactic because he was absolutely sure that Malfoy would back off. He talked about raising his son in the "traditions" of his family, why wasn't it reasonable for Harry to assume that?

_I wanted to meet you to thank you. At the very least, I wanted to express my gratitude in person. I find the medium of letter and ink a clumsy way to do it. And it must be especially clumsy, since you managed to misinterpret my intent so badly._

_I do not despise you. I think that you don't know as much about pure-bloods as you think you do, and if you persist in that ignorance when I have shown you that we aren't as bad as you thought, you'll become offensive. But for the moment, you're still someone I would like to speak with, someone I would like to meet._

_If you don't want to do that, all you have to do is say so. I will retire, and you can maintain your own kind of purity among your acquaintances._

Harry winced again, and then sat down in the chair next to the desk, which, he noticed from the corner of his eye, made the owl perk up. Malfoy might say that he didn't express himself well in letters, but his words sure could sting.

_But I think there is no good reason for us not to meet. You've provided me with valuable advice. I want to say thank you. You don't have friends among my enemies. You don't have a grudge against my family, or you would never have written me back. You don't have a grudge that comes from the war, either. Your children sound interesting, and your wife as if she makes you happy. You could not hurt me._

That last line made Harry snort bitterly and drop his head against the back of the chair. "If you had the _least _idea," he told the ceiling.

The owl shifted on its perch and dropped a pellet on the floor. Harry sighed and looked at the last little paragraph of the letter.

_If you have your own reasons for not wanting to meet, by all means say so, and I will do my best to accept them._

_Sincerely,_

_Draco._

Harry leaned his forehead on his hand and regarded the letter some more, but nothing came to mind. There were no good choices here. He shouldn't have written to Draco as Ethan at all, or let that name out into the world. Ethan Starfall was his private consolation and his private joy, never meant for anyone else's eyes, whether or not they would tease him for it.

So, while he still couldn't explain who he was, because Malfoy would probably hunt him down if that happened, he could try to apologize. And give an explanation that at least was the truth without nuance.

He picked up another sheet of parchment, because the first one in front of him wasn't inspiring him with Ethan's voice at all, and closed his eyes and sat there for a bit before he finally opened his eyes and put quill to paper.

_Dear Draco,_

_Yes, I have reasons of my own for not wanting to meet. I should have told you the truth from the beginning, that we could never know each other and never be friends in person, and perhaps I should never have responded to your initial letter. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to raise your hopes and then dash them down again._

_I'm glad that my advice has helped you raise your son. That has to be the chief joy that came out of this correspondence, that I know I helped you. I hope that you and your son and even your ex-wife have plenty of happy times in the future._

Harry winced again. Here came the hardest part, but both his conscience and the owl walking and clucking anxiously on the table were telling him that he would be in danger if he stopped.

_I'm sorry for assuming that you wouldn't want to meet up with someone who wasn't pure-blood. You're right that you weren't asking for friendship or for anything other than advice. And I'm the one who chose to answer that letter. I just could have sent it on to someone else the way that you suggested I do if I didn't have the experience raising children._

_Again, I'm sorry. I made lots of assumptions, especially the assumption that we could just maintain this correspondence for a long period of time and you would never demand anything more than that. You caught me off-guard when you asked for a meeting, and that was why I responded the way I did. I know nothing can actually make up for answering your letter in such a nebulous way, but I offer my apologies for what good they can do._

Harry hesitated as he thought about how to sign it, then firmed his mouth and clutched his quill. No, he was going to do this.

_Sincerely,_

_Ethan Starfall._

The last word paired with the false name seemed mocking to him, but anything else would seem more mocking still. Harry folded the letter carefully into its envelope and didn't even have the chance to hold it out before the owl snatched it from him. Hooting in agitation, the owl took off and soared through the window. Harry sucked at the blood from its talon-scratch on his finger.

_I'm sorry, Draco, _he thought, calling Malfoy by his first name in his mind as he never would aloud. _I hope you can understand._

* * *

_This is the strangest letter I've ever received in my life._

Draco leaned his chin on his palm and regarded Ethan's letter. But it didn't change form, or sprout more paragraphs, or explain itself. There it was, a bald apology for something that shouldn't have needed an apology in the first place.

_Why did he send this, if he meant what he said in the first letter? _

But then Draco shook his head and snorted. His father had always emphasized careful and multiple rereadings of important communications. Draco had found the answer to that on the second trip through the letter. There was no sign that Ethan had _ever _believed that Draco held blood purity beliefs. He had just thought those beliefs were a convenient excuse not to meet with him.

_What are the sorts of things that would cause people to avoid going out in public?_

Well, if they were hideously deformed, of course. Draco reckoned that someone who was hideously deformed could still write a plausible-sounding letter and might even have found someone who would want to marry them and have children with them, even if his wife had to close her eyes when they were in the same bed.

But there were other answers that he had to consider before he settled on that as the final one.

Perhaps Ethan was shy and socially graceless, only confident when he had ink and parchment between himself and the world. Perhaps he was a known criminal and needed to stay out of public places; he had only responded to Draco's letter in that case because he'd known that Draco would hardly go around advertising his source of advice.

_Or perhaps he's simply lying._

That consideration came along with the kick of truth, and made Draco narrow his eyes and growl dangerously, low in his throat. His father had told him he would know when someone was trying to take advantage of him, if he just listened to his instincts. And Draco had been right about numerous things, including people who had tried to kidnap Scorpius or to simply take his money, and about Astoria's parents when they came asking for money for "Astoria and her inventions."

The thing was, what could Ethan possibly have to gain from lying? It wasn't like he had suggested that Draco send out a letter, or that he could have known the owl would choose him even if he had. Draco knew that Blaise had really been Blaise, not someone Polyjuiced into his friend, and Draco's owl had likewise been with him for years and was thoroughly guarded against enchantments that would influence him. Ethan couldn't know that Scorpius would have problems as a result of the divorce. He couldn't know that Draco and Astoria would divorce, for that matter. This kind of lie, the elaborate edifice of deception that had immediately sprung up in Draco's head, wouldn't stand for long; it would be toppled by the sheer effort of all the coincidences and good luck Ethan would have to have.

_Maybe that was why he backed away from trying to fool you so quickly. Because he saw that he couldn't keep up the lies._

But Draco had been willing to trust him, to meet with him. What had suggested to Ethan that his pretenses wouldn't work indefinitely?

_What if it's a specific kind of lie? The sort that would work through the medium of a letter but not in person?_

Considering it, Draco had to nod decisively. Yes, _that _made much more sense. Not that he liked being tricked or lied to, about anything at all, but Ethan might think Draco would never ask to meet, and he could go along his merry way deceiving Draco, only to be confronted by a request he had never planned on. So he had to back out.

Which left totally unanswered the question of what Ethan would have to gain from lying in the first place.

But Draco distrusted Ethan more than he did that kick in his gut that told him it was true, that Ethan had lied about _something_.

_For now, _Draco decided slowly, cocking his head so he could study the letter from all sides and make sure he really hadn't missed any clues, _I'll go along with this. I want to know what he thinks he can win from me, who he thinks he is. I'll tell him that we don't have to meet up, and go on asking his advice about Scorpius._

_I'll lure him in, make him comfortable, the way he was planning on doing with me. It might not get me much closer to the truth, unless I can trick him into a meeting, but at least it gives him more time to slip up and betray his real intentions._

A faint smile on his face, Draco reached for the parchment that he had piled beside him in readiness and started writing, pausing every few words to make sure that the shapes of the letters and the splatters of ink didn't betray his anger or his real purpose.

_Dear Ethan,_

_Apology accepted. Just make sure that you don't accuse me of baseless blood purity beliefs again. I don't have them._

_One thing I was wondering…_


	9. A Series of Complications

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—A Series of Complications_

"Auror Weasley asked me to talk to you because he thought that perhaps you had adopted a deliberately self-destructive pattern."

Harry stared at Kingsley across the desk, and then ruined all the careful formality he knew Kingsley was trying to bring to this conversation by slumping forwards with his head in his hands, and snorting. "Ron thinks that I'm trying to kill myself or something?"

Kingsley shifted in his chair and cleared his throat with a delicacy that Harry usually appreciated, but not now. "Auror Weasley is concerned that the number of injuries to your leg in the last few months, combined with the news that your former wife is—er—awaiting the birth of a child—"

"She's pregnant, Kingsley, you can say it," said Harry, and grinned a little as he watched Kingsley's face color up. Then he snorted again. "And I'm not trying to deliberately hurt myself. I've had a run of bad luck, like so many Aurors do now and again."

"But so many injuries to the same area." Kingsley appeared relieved that he wasn't going to have to talk about Harry and Ginny's former marriage. "Auror Weasley thought that perhaps you were not allowing the first injury time to heal properly."

Harry shrugged. "I did everything the Healers told me to. Perhaps they overestimated how healed I was."

"Very likely." Kingsley nodded, then paused. Harry braced himself. "Regardless, you're still going to be behind a desk for the next month."

"A _month_?" Harry stood up and pointedly flexed his legs. "The Healers said that a week of bed rest at the most would make me well, and I've had a fortnight!"

"Being behind a desk isn't bed rest," said Kingsley, and his faced filled with unholy glee. "Particularly as you're going to be dealing with applications for our next class of trainees."

"Kingsley," said Harry, and tried his best to assume a pathetic appearance, which would have been easy if he wasn't feeling really healthy after all the enforced relaxation and potions the Healers had piled on him. "You want to take someone you think is fragile and put them through _that_?"

"Don't worry," said Kingsley sweetly. "If you can't stand up under the rigors of it, I can always send you back to hospital."

* * *

"Draco, can I talk to you?"

Draco glanced up from the diary he was reading, one of his Great-aunt Honoria's. She had described, in some detail, how her parents had raised her much-younger brother; she had already been almost twenty when he was born, and of an age to enjoy the raising and note details without being blinded by resentment or immaturity. Draco thought that he might find some valuable suggestions for training Scorpius there.

Now Blaise hovered in the doorway of his private study, face grave. Draco stood quickly. "What is it? Has something happened to Scorpius?"

"No. He just said something today that I wanted to talk to you about." Blaise walked into the room and closed the door behind him, but didn't say anything after that. He only stood there, apparently listening to the quiet flickering of the fire, until Draco brought his hand down in a slashing motion.

"You're still talking like it's an illness."

"You don't have to worry about him," Blaise said dryly. "He enjoyed the day, and right now he's eating cake and happily playing with the house-elves' illusions and this little charmed lion that we bought today." He hesitated. "He said that he doesn't want to be a Malfoy, Draco."

Draco sagged into his chair hard enough to make Blaise yell for a house-elf. Izzy appeared, squeaking and concerned.

"It is _not _a heart attack," Draco said, holding up one palm to prevent her from overreacting. His father had had a heart attack immediately after the war, stress exacerbating a heart defect they hadn't known was there, but Draco thought his friends and servants too likely to jump to the wrong conclusions here. He looked up at Blaise. "What was the context for this…"

He stopped. It was so horrible that he didn't even have a word for it.

Luckily, Blaise understood what he was trying to say, and supplied an answer for it. "It was when we were coming back through Muggle London and he stopped and watched one of those flying devices they have. Aeroplanes?" Blaise spoke the word with relish, and Draco grimaced and nodded. He had seen one once. That was enough. "He said that Muggles had a lot more fun than wizards, and sometimes he didn't want to be a wizard. I reminded him that we had magic and they didn't. He said, 'That's right.' Then he was quiet for a while, and then he said, 'I don't want to be a Malfoy.'"

"Did he say why?"

"I assumed," said Blaise, "by the power of my fabulous and brilliant intellect, that it was connected to what he'd said already. You do rather deprive the child of fun, Draco. You can't even take him to have fun yourself. It's always me or Pansy who has to do it."

Draco stood straight up. "If you resent me asking you to take my son somewhere, just say the word, and you'll never have to do it again."

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Blaise said, making Draco flinch a little again. Draco had never known someone who swore so casually. "I don't mind taking him anywhere. He's a good little kid, and I like spending time with him."

Draco frowned some more and opened his mouth to ask what the problem was, then, but he didn't get the chance. Blaise was charging on and spinning out sparks of that intellect he liked to talk about. "What I _don't _like is that you take every sign of the way he talks as though that means he'll hate everything about you by the time he's seven."

"What? I don't—"

"You think he has to be a little adult now, and you're _terrified _that he might grow up and reject his heritage." Blaise eyed him measuringly. "I told you what he said not because I really believe that, you know. That's because certain people in the world are _smarter_."

Draco held onto his temper with a vengeance. "Then why did you tell me?"

"Because I didn't want him to innocently repeat it later and have you yell at him." Blaise slid his hands into his pockets, and asked, "Can I get a drink around here?" Izzy promptly appeared with a glass of champagne, which Blaise liked for some reason, on a tray. "And I wanted you to know something about what he really thinks and feels. He's developing that mask you think he should, all right, but you're the one who can't see behind it."

Draco turned his head away. "Well, that's a gentle way of telling me that I'm doing a horrible job raising my son, I suppose."

"And that's another reason that I don't often say this to you, because you take it all so _personally_," said Blaise. He reached out and picked up the diary Draco had been reading. "All you do is sit in your house all day and brood on what Scorpius is going to become, and how you're going to train him, and the lessons you'll give him. You're always thinking about when he's older."

"So did my father."

"And his choices always worked out _so well_."

Draco flinched again, but Blaise had known him too long and well to be put off by that. He just stood there, looking Draco in the face, and then continued in a quiet, penetrating voice Draco hadn't heard in a long time.

"Listen to me, Draco. You need to spend some time doing something other than just sitting around the house. Come out with me more often. Go out with Pansy for longer than an hour or so. Accept one of Theodore's invitations. He's told me that he's asked you to Switzerland and India _and _Thailand, and each time, you spurn those invitations as though he'd asked you to dredge through that muck he finds so fascinating. You know he'd just want you to lounge around in the houses he stays in and have some fun with him in the evenings, when he's cleaned up."

Draco shook his head, feeling his mouth form a thin line. "I don't despise Theodore for working with—the dirtier sorts of potions ingredients. He makes good money enough. It's the other part of his life I can't stand."

Blaise stared at him in what seemed like genuine confusion. Draco sneered and started to make a remark about fabulous intellects, but then Blaise said, "_Ah_. Because he has love affairs and actual passion in his life, I suppose."

"I have passion!"

"For tradition. I hate to break this to you, Draco," Blaise said, and leaned forwards to whisper ostentatiously, "but traditions can't love you back."

Draco stood there, boiling with the passion that Blaise had told him he didn't have, and wanted to snap, badly. Blaise thought that he was too calm, that he was too devoted to tradition? Well, Draco would start a tradition right now of punching smug friends who thought they could talk to him that way in the face, and see what _Blaise _did about that.

"There's no reason for you to despise Theodore," said Blaise, looking him in the eye now the way he only did when he wanted to be serious. "He's tried to be your friend. He's said that you can bring Scorpius with you. He's offered to take care of Scorpius himself. He's offered to bring you into his business and let you handle the negotiations, because it would give you something to do and he's as concerned about you huddling alone in this house as I am. You keep refusing. The only reason for you to do that and then languish to Pansy and me about how you never see him is because he isn't living the sort of emotionless life that you think proper for a pure-blood."

"I love my son. I'm _not _emotionless."

"But you're trying to be," said Blaise. "Another nugget of advice, Draco. My mother tried to show me traditions that were beautiful and pleasant, so I'd _want _to follow them. Dropping a load of dung on your son and calling it tradition isn't the way to make him love it."

Draco curled his lip. "Thank you for taking Scorpius to Muggle London today," he said, and made sure that every word was etched in the sort of clear vowels that Blaise liked to tease him about not having. "I'm sure he had a good time. Now, get out of my house." He laid his hand on his wand just in case Blaise didn't get it.

"You're making so many mistakes that you just don't see," said Blaise, not moving, which was most unlike him. Draco knew Blaise was a lot of things, not all of them things one could discuss in public, but he was no hero and no Gryffindor. "You don't have to give up your life solely to the raising of Scorpius. You'll just end up resenting the poor kid because you can't have fun and he won't follow the pure-blood ways that you want him to, anyway. You might as well let him have some fun, and have some fun yourself."

"Get out," Draco whispered again. His hand had closed on his wand to the point where he was vaguely surprised he hadn't snapped it. "When I want your advice, I'll _ask _for it."

"I'll see you next week when we have that day you're supposed to actually visit me and Pansy for a while," said Blaise, and then turned and walked out of the study.

Draco sat down, shaking. Tremors had invaded his body, and he didn't really know if it was all because he had nearly drawn his wand on Blaise, or because of the news Blaise had brought him. Draco had known he wasn't doing everything perfectly, but he'd thought he was getting better lately, partially because of Ethan's advice. Why had Scorpius decided that he would rather not be a Malfoy _now_, of all times?

He should listen to Blaise, he thought. Blaise was the one who knew more of what it was like to be a pure-blood than Ethan did, who had admitted right up-front that he was an outsider.

But Draco's head was whirling, and the only solid thing he had to cling to was that Ethan had given him good advice once before.

He dug around for parchment and ink an embarrassingly long time before he remembered that he could command a house-elf to bring them to him. Then he had to sit there some more embarrassing pauses of time before he could come up with the words that would reveal his need to Ethan but not bare too much of his heart.

He was not satisfied with the letter that he sent on its way at last, but at least it would make Ethan understand that the need was urgent.

* * *

_Dear Ethan,_

_My best friend told me today that my son had said he didn't want to be a Malfoy. Oh, not to me, but to my friend as they walked through Muggle London, where my friend took Scorpius to see the sights._

_I don't know what to do. My friend thinks that trying to teach Scorpius to love these traditions is going to drive him away from them, but I can't simply give up and allow Scorpius to do whatever he wants. That's not a good idea for raising any child, even one who isn't the heir to a proud family._

_Please advise me._

Malfoy hadn't signed the note this time, but perhaps he thought there was no need. Harry sighed, shifted his weight, and laid the letter on one side of the desk, next to the staggered pile of Auror trainee applications. There were so many that he'd had to bring them home with him, and he still hadn't reached the end of half the essays.

Malfoy's letter was almost refreshing, in contrast.

It still took Harry a few minutes to shrug off the Auror mantle and put on the one of Ethan Starfall, untroubled wizard, but when he did, words that were as honest as he could make them spilled onto the page.

_Dear Draco,_

_Yes, that does sound like a bad situation. First, I have to ask: is the thought of Scorpius growing up without becoming a perfect Malfoy such a bad thing?_

_I take it that you know by now I'm no friend to pure-blood traditions. I don't despise them, but I do think that people should be free to follow their inclinations, and not scorned all their lives because they chose not to follow one particular one. I don't know exactly what you're teaching your son, but if he doesn't like it and he's resisting it, then why not try teaching him something else for a while?_

_I'm saying this for Scorpius's sake, mostly, but also for yours. You sound so desperately unhappy. Do you _really _want to be this stern and unbending representation of tradition, yourself? Do you lie awake at night and judge yourself for all the ways you've failed? I used to do something similar, though not with pure-blood traditions, of course, and I realized that trying to live up to this impossible standard made me much more unhappy than just giving it up did._

Harry had to pause, and choke back a chuckle. He doubted that Malfoy would suspect he had lain awake at night worrying about not meeting the wizarding public's impossible standards for a hero.

_Let him never suspect it. _Such contact and communication as Malfoy had built, after all, was with Ethan Starfall, not Harry Potter.

That was a bit sad, when one thought about it. But Harry was thinking about Malfoy and Scorpius right now, not his own life. He shook his head, and returned to the letter.

_Maybe it's time to think about what's most important, about what Scorpius likes, about what you can't bear to give up, and what you can. I don't think that you should just shrug off all your heritage and devote yourself to pleasure, but what you're doing right now isn't working. Why not try something that will? Even if that something is just talking to Scorpius and seeing what happens._

_Yours,_

_Ethan._

* * *

Draco laid Ethan's letter against his leg and tilted his head back to stare up at the ceiling.

Not even Ethan understood. He was _alone_.

Well, Ethan was a liar who was only paying court to Draco for his own mysterious reasons, no matter how much he seemed to understand. Draco had been silly for expecting sympathy from that quarter.

He set about systematically ripping up the letter, until small white flakes lay scattered all around his chair. He might have gone on doing the same thing until the flakes were indistinguishable from dust if the fireplace hadn't flared unexpectedly to life in front of him.

Draco stared. Not even Blaise or Pansy could get through his wards without prior permission. The only people who could were—

"Mr. Zabini informed me that I would find you brooding and feeling sorry for yourself. I am pained to see that he was correct."

Draco felt a flush of freezing fire travel all through his body, locking his hands into place on the arms of the chair and his legs into place in front of him. "You needn't have contacted me if it bothered you so much, Mother."

Narcissa only stared at him in cool silence for a few minutes, as though inviting him to retract the statement. Draco didn't. They had started out with insults, and that meant she might as well take herself off. At least they had _descended _to insults in the course of their last argument about Scorpius.

"You need some occupation," said Narcissa, "other than holding yourself up as a mirror to Scorpius and brooding every time a feature does not match."

"I also don't need another argument about Scorpius," Draco retorted, and reached out to close the fireplace.

"Will you listen to me, Draco? I love my grandson, but I love you, too, as my child. And I am concerned about you."

Draco hesitated, then stayed his hand. He grunted when Narcissa only paused, apparently awaiting permission to begin. He couldn't remember ever seeing her do that before. She must be concerned about him, the way she had said.

"Thank you," said Narcissa, and looked into his face. "I think you worry too much about doing things that no Malfoy has ever done. You told me once that no Malfoy has ever divorced before, or raised their son without the cooperation of another parent, or in a world in which their name was disgraced. That means that you have to be more vigilant what it comes to raising Scorpius, and protect him more."

"I remember my own words perfectly well," Draco retorted, but he was a little startled that _she _had remembered them so well. Most of the time, when he argued with his parents, he had the sense they weren't listening to him. They were just coming up with their own arguments that they would speak when it was their turn.

Maybe they were listening more closely than he'd thought. Maybe he should listen to them more often.

Narcissa leaned forwards a little. "It's time for you to know that there were Malfoys in the past who divorced, and there were times that our family name was disgraced. Lucius hushed up those tales because he thought you would have enough to cope with, when it came to living under the shadow of the accusations against him in the first war."

"I never thought about that," said Draco blankly. And he couldn't remember anybody specifically giving him a hard time about that. Most of the children he knew well in Slytherin, or before he went to Hogwarts, had parents in the same situation. And once he got to Hogwarts, the people who disliked him were the ones who were going to hate him because of his name, not because of recent history. "I—you mean some of our ancestors _did _divorce?"

"Yes." Narcissa gave him a look almost of pity. "Or at least separate, and live apart from each other, with other lovers. Did you think that the failure of your marriage was somehow unique, Draco, that you were lesser than everyone else who ever walked the corridors of the Manor? I cannot imagine why you would think that. Only the other day I was thinking that our labors to instill some pride in you had borne marvelous fruit."

Draco bristled a little. "I think I deserve to have some pride about all that my ancestors have done."

"Which includes reality," said Narcissa. "Marriages that did not work out. Marriages that did not endure. Parents who died or abandoned their responsibilities. Wizards' duels that did not go as they were supposed to. Foolish investments." She paused again. "I know that you spend a lot of your time looking up histories and diaries in the library. You never ran across any of this?"

"I had no reason to look for it," said Draco. "I was looking for information on our traditions and the child-rearing history of our family."

Narcissa sighed and bowed her head a little, heavy hair tumbling down her neck. "I wish you could believe that you were a good father," she murmured. "Since it seems to bother you so much."

"I think I could be better, that's all," said Draco. He hesitated, and then decided to tell her. "And now, according to Blaise, Scorpius is saying that he wishes he wasn't a Malfoy. I _have _to be better."

"The things that five-year-old children say are not what they will always believe a year hence," said Narcissa, and shook her head when Draco opened his mouth to argue. "In this particular case, I think I have more experience than you do."

Draco fumed silently to himself. He had to admit that was probably true. But he didn't know what his mother expected. Not to worry so much, to trust her, but still to pay even closer attention than he had to his family's history, since he had somehow missed so much of it?

He had to deny that knowing he wasn't the first Malfoy to have a divorce made a shiver of something like cool water run down his spine. But he did wish that his parents could have told him earlier.

"Our offer still stands," said Narcissa, watching him with careful eyes. "To take Scorpius for a short time. Not to raise him permanently, Draco. I think you must have misunderstood us last time. I would never wish to take him away from his father for good. Only to give you a holiday, and a chance to think things over, and to remember what you care about beyond Scorpius. It is never a good idea to be so wrapped up in your child that you forget the rest of the world exists. The effect of such obsessive attention on the child can be to spoil them, or warp your priorities."

Draco had a stiff little speech all ready. He was going to tell his mother that he did care about other things, and that he would never spoil Scorpius. He was going to say that he wasn't warped. He was going to say that perhaps _he _could have used more of his parents' attention, since they had kept even basic facts about his heritage concealed from him.

But then he reconsidered. A new idea had unfurled inside his head, and it would use up the anger brewing in his stomach, and keep that anger from spilling out on his friends, or parents, or son. They hadn't done anything to merit that anger, not really (except perhaps his parents, in lying to him). Someone else had, and it was fitting Draco spend some more time pursuing and punishing him. It would be easier to do that if someone else was looking after Scorpius.

"You have decided to let us take him for a while," said his mother, who must have been watching Draco more closely than he'd realized. "Although I don't know why."

"There's something I'm interested in," said Draco with perfect truth, smiling at her. "It would require research and maybe even leaving the Manor for extended periods of time. I can't do that if Scorpius is here. Why _don't _you take him for a time, and see if he minds you and if you really don't spoil him?"

His mother was still. Then she said, "I know you have a reason behind this change of yours, but I do not trust it."

Draco spoke a few more sweet, flattering words. He had made his decision. Everyone else kept telling him that he needed time away from Scorpius? He would have it. He would go and satisfy one question, track down one person who had betrayed him, and take out his anger on that person. Then, well, then maybe he could come back and be a good father and a good Malfoy at the same time, and let Scorpius have some distance from him, and include some outside, adult interests in his life again.

He had to do something to get rid of this anger first, though.

And tracking down a liar who called himself Ethan Starfall and who had failed Draco when he needed him the most sounded like a good way to do that.


	10. A Hunted Target

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—A Hunted Target_

Harry sighed and finally turned away from the window. He supposed that he shouldn't be surprised he'd received no response to his letter. Maybe he had stunned Malfoy. Maybe he needed time to think about the advice that Harry had offered him. Maybe he was in the middle of having a long talk with Scorpius right now, and he would send thanks in the morning

But since he had always written back almost immediately, it did bewilder Harry a little.

_I hope Malfoy and Scorpius are okay, _Harry thought as he went into his bedroom and started taking his clothes off.

Then he shook his head. Why wouldn't they be? They were behind the protection of powerful wards, and except for certain isolated times like today, when Malfoy said that his friend had taken Scorpius to Muggle London, they never ventured out. Malfoy had actually escaped suspicion for a crime or two, because the people who'd reported him breaking into their houses or trying to torture them apparently didn't know he was practically a recluse. Their stories always broke down when the Aurors investigated.

_If anything, I should be feeling sorry for myself, _Harry decided drowsily as he slid into bed. _All those applications to get through. And all those _horrible _essays. At least I know I wrote better than that when I was their age. Hermione wouldn't have tolerated anything less…_

He slid into sleep slowly, one part of him still wondering about Malfoy, the rest of him concentrated on those Auror trainee applications that he would have to get through tomorrow.

* * *

Draco paused one more time before he went into the Leaky Cauldron, making sure that the glamour over his face was perfect. It was connected to the hood of his cloak, which meant that he had a backup; it was unlikely to dissipate unless someone yanked his cloak off first. And he would keep his hood up as much as possible.

But he would have to lower it _some _of the time to ask for information. That thought made Draco's guts flutter. He swallowed and kept walking as though nothing was wrong, avoiding two wizards who came in laughing behind him.

The pub was crowded; it seemed that even on a Thursday night, lots of people came here to drink and talk. Draco paused once, then made his way to a small table in a dark corner that was probably unpopular because of the lack of light. In this case, it was perfect. Draco sat down and spent a moment scrutinizing the crowd.

Some were pure-blood wizards he knew; he discarded them as a source of information at once. The chances that they would have heard of a Muggleborn wizard who'd been out of the country during the war were low. Besides, they were the sort who hadn't shown much sympathy to Malfoys since the war, and although Draco was in disguise, he didn't want to listen to insults against his family while he investigated.

A large pack of Aurors drinking near the front of the pub also made Draco curl his lip. They hadn't bothered him much since the first year or two after his trial, but Ethan had made a particular point of mentioning that he led a peaceful life. He wouldn't be working among them, and they probably wouldn't know him.

_Are you sure about that? Given that he lied about so much else._

Draco shifted restlessly. He noticed then that he was drawing a few curious looks, mostly from some warlocks who sat in the back of the pub, at a table opposite his that was almost blocked by the length of the bar. Draco lifted his chin and glared back. He didn't know if they could be a source of information or not, but he wasn't about to look weak in front of them.

The three warlocks spoke in sharp whispers among themselves for a moment, and then one of them stood up and walked towards Draco, stopping about a cloak-length from his table. He was a tall man with rangy muscles and the kind of wild black beard that warlocks favored, and he wore a dingy robe that was still embroidered with moons and stars. Draco sat there in silence and gave him no encouragement.

"Well met, brother," said the warlock at last.

Draco gave a start. _He thinks I'm a warlock?_

But his glamour did have a beard, and did wear a robe that had more mystical symbols on it than were common among most wizards anymore, and he had stalked in here and then sat glaring at everyone with no attempt to socialize. He supposed that a warlock was the least strange thing they could think him to be.

And he would go with it. "Brother," said Draco, cautiously, and let one hand drop behind the table as if he was touching his wand to make sure he still had it. "How are you?"

The warlock paused as if he was studying Draco. This might be the end of the pretense, Draco thought, and the beginning of a duel. If warlocks had any sort of strange code or signs they were supposed to pass between themselves, he didn't know what it was.

But then the man nodded and said, "My name is Moonstar. Will you join us?"

The similarity of the name to "Starfall" made Draco's blood jump for a moment, but then he reminded himself that plenty of wizards had that word in their last names. He considered it visibly for a second, then nodded and stood up. "As long as your companions have no objections," he said, looking at the warlocks in the corner for a second.

The warlock snorted a little and turned to walk Draco over to the table. "They'll learn to keep it to themselves, if they do. They're young, and still apprentices." He flashed Draco a grin that Draco thought was edged as a knife. "I command here."

_Do you? _Draco just nodded, though, and continued following Moonstar back to his table. There was a long moment before he sat down when the other two warlocks bristled at him, but they looked back and forth between him and Moonstar, and subsided in a few seconds. Draco could see that one of them had sandy hair and a long beard, and the other dark hair and no beard, but that was all he could make out. They kept their hoods pulled up, just like he had.

"Take a seat, brother, and tell us your name," said Moonstar, tugging out a chair for Draco.

Draco sat down, felt Moonstar nudge the chair back towards the table, and frowned a little. He thought he would still have plenty of space to get to his wand and back from the table if he needed to, but he was no longer sure. He did his best to keep his face calm and an expression of slightly superior disdain on his features.

"My name is Cometborn," said Draco, fabricating as he went along. He had thought of a different name for his glamoured self, but it wasn't one that would fit in well with warlocks. He remained silent after that, glancing from face to face.

Moonstar shrugged a second later, his smile easy. "I can't blame you for wanting to know names. These are my fellows Shadowskill and Velvetmask." The sandy-haired one and the dark-haired one nodded in turn. "What have you come here seeking?"

The answer was on the tip of Draco's tongue, and it was actually one that fit well with the persona he had adopted. "Vengeance."

Moonstar smiled a little more broadly and waved a hand towards the front of the pub. Several tankards floated over; Draco didn't know the foaming drink inside, but it was light brown and glinted with flecks of something dark floating near the top. Moonstar gave him the tankard and gestured for him to drink. Draco cast a nonverbal spell that would turn some of the drink invisible, and lifted it to his lips.

"On someone hard to find?" Moonstar asked, and Draco nodded, mouth busy with the small amount of the drink he had swallowed. "Well. You came to the right place, brother. Vengeance is our specialty."

"I know his name," said Draco, and put down the tankard in front of him. He thought Velvetmask smiled when he saw how much of the drink was apparently gone. If he was ignorant enough not to notice the spells Draco had used, that was a good thing, Draco told himself, and ignored the little thrill of danger that came from knowing Moonstar had definitely given him that big a mug on purpose. "But I do not know his current location, and even the name may be a lie. He wrote to me offering help with a problem. His advice did not work as he said it would."

"And you are left with the chaos of the problem to clean up?" Moonstar folded his hands and regarded Draco thoughtfully. "That can be a hard thing."

"In this case," said Draco, and he knew his voice was sufficiently grim to convince them when Shadowskill leaned a little away from him, "it might have rendered the problem unsolvable."

"Tell us the name, then," said Moonstar. "Even if it is false, so many people leave clues and traces in their false names of their real ones. They seem to be unable to resist using the same initials, or including a reference to their real names that they think is clever."

Draco smiled tightly. This was the part where he had to take a risk. He thought that Starfall hadn't revealed the truth about Draco's trouble with Scorpius to anyone, or it would be in the papers already, but so much about him was a lie. Draco had only his instincts, which had turned out to be less than reliable.

On the other hand, he also had his desire for vengeance, and so he murmured, "Ethan Starfall."

No instant recognition sprang into the eyes of the warlocks, at least. Moonstar looked inquiringly at his "brethren," who both shook their heads.

"The name makes him sound like a pure-blood," said Moonstar, and glanced at Draco. "Have you begun in that direction?"

Draco laughed, and let his bitterness color it. "I have some knowledge in that direction, yes. What I know is that no pure-blood family named Starfall exists. Of course, that does not mean that he is _not _a pure-blood." He had to suspect and doubt the most basic facts about Ethan, he was seeing now, however well-established they had seemed. "He did tell me, however, that he was unfamiliar with some aspects of pure-blood life, and that he had been out of the country during the war."

"That will make him easier to track down." Moonstar nodded, his gaze abstracted. Then he turned to Draco, and his face was as sharp as anyone could wish. "If we help you, there is the matter of payment."

Warlocks were mostly outcast wizards who had become alienated from regular wizarding society because of the extent to which they pursued Dark Arts, or poisons, or experimental breeding of magical creatures. Draco knew that the hard part of the task wouldn't be paying them, but finding something that they would accept he had a good reason for having.

After a moment of thought, he had it. "I have access—secret access—to a natural patch of bloodraven," he said. "I have changed my interests and no longer use the spells or potions that require bloodraven. Would that be enough payment?"

Moonstar tried to avoid the way his eyes widened, Draco thought, but it happened anyway. "It would indeed," he said, after a brief choke. "I didn't know there was any natural bloodraven left."

Draco smiled. Bloodraven was a combination of plant and stone, colored like a raven's wings, and only growing where the blood of a wizard had been spilled by a Muggle. It was an incredibly powerful Potions ingredient, and could sometimes be used to construct plague spells. Most of it had been claimed already, and while it could be made by means of another potion, artificial bloodraven was never as powerful as the real thing.

"I suspect that my ancestors treasured the secret on purpose," said Draco. "This is a secret I have by inheritance and truce, not through discovering it on my own." That much was true, since the bloodraven grew in a distant corner of the Malfoy grounds. "They never needed the wealth it could provide, preferring the power of the stone itself. But they are dead now, and I need my revenge more."

Moonstar nodded, but his eyes had sharpened again. "Then you are pure-blood yourself."

"Does that mean you will not make a bargain with me?" Draco let his voice grow cool. He had thought it wouldn't be a problem, since not many warlocks were Muggleborn, but if it was, and Moonstar had prejudices of his own…

"No," said Moonstar. "For the sake of bloodraven, there is little I will not dare." He leaned forwards. "We need to know more of this Ethan Starfall, and what else you have done to locate him. Something he has touched would be best."

"I left the letter he sent me at home," said Draco, which was true. He didn't have the last one, the one he'd torn up, but he did have all the others Ethan had sent him. "If we arrange a second meeting, however, then I'll bring it with me."

"We need any other details that you can give us, in its place," said Moonstar. "If we are to start tracking him and bring you the revenge you desire as soon as you desire it." His eyes burned at Draco.

Draco swallowed breathlessness. He had come here of his own free will, and made the alliance with the warlocks of his own free will. He couldn't back out now because he was beginning to suspect that the warlocks might do something…permanent to Ethan.

But he could at least make sure that he was there to watch the permanent thing. "I want his location," he said. "More than anything, I want to look into his lying face before I hurt him. I want the vengeance to be up-close and personal."

"We'll find him, then." Moonstar didn't look displeased, so Draco must not have thwarted the deep desire for violence that he thought Moonstar had. "But I can understand why you want to see him. Other details."

Draco settled down to tell them what he knew: the names of Ethan's wife and his children, little details about his hobbies and activities, the way that Ethan had spoken of his family, how he had first contacted him. He did not reveal details of the problem that had led him to contact Ethan in the first place, because that was private and his own. Besides, the warlocks might stare at him if they heard that he'd sought advice on child-rearing.

Moonstar did look up once in the middle of writing down what Draco told him, and murmur, "This concerns your family?"

"It does," said Draco, and stared him down.

Moonstar only considered him for a second, and then turned away, with a twitch of his lips that looked satisfied. Draco didn't know if he was happy because he thought Draco would be more likely to pay them if the matter was personal, or for some other reason.

It didn't matter. Not if they found Ethan for him. Not if Draco could use up this anger swirling around in him. He couldn't drive his friends and family away from him; he knew, when he calmed down, that they would still be there, and that he would need their help to raise Scorpius.

He didn't need Ethan's help. He didn't need anything from Ethan except the truth, and then a slow, crumbling repayment.

_That _part, he was looking forward to.

* * *

Harry slumped back on the couch and shook his head over the scribbled mess of an essay he was reading. It was hopeless, really. He had read essays by other second-years at Hogwarts, when he was a second-year, that had been written better.

He placed the essay in the steadily growing pile of rejected applications, and then sighed, stood up, and walked over to the cabinet in the corner where he kept his store of wines and whiskeys. Hermione would sometimes cock a disapproving eyebrow at him when she visited, but that was mainly because Ron did all his drinking out of her sight, Harry thought.

And Ron hadn't had as much time to drink since the arrival of his children. There was that.

It was a problem Harry would be glad to share.

He shook off the thought, and took out a bottle of golden wine that he'd received as a gift for proving that a stuffy pure-blood witch was actually innocent of the necromancy charge she'd been arrested for. Her note had said that it was wine made by fairies, brewed under full moons and to be saved for a special occasion.

Harry hesitated. Then he opened it anyway. This wasn't a special occasion, but it was as close to one as he thought he would get for a long time.

He hadn't written in his journal in days. Those were all the days he'd spent waiting for Malfoy's return letter. Apparently, writing as Ethan to someone else, letting Ethan out into the world even as just a name and a few details from his life, had drained the impulse that prompted Harry to practice being him.

_Maybe I shouldn't have done it. It's not like I couldn't have passed on Malfoy's letter to someone who had real experience raising children._

But he had experience with Teddy and Rose and Hugo, at least. He had lied because it was necessary to lie, because he had concealed even from most of the public who knew him as Harry Potter that he was now infertile, and who knew whether the person he could have given Malfoy's letter would stay sympathetic once they found out who they were writing to?

_I probably just did the best I could, and for a limited part that Malfoy needed me to play, _Harry told himself firmly as he poured the fairy wine into a glass. _Or maybe he hated my advice and he's never going to write to me again. Either way, it's his life and his son. And Ethan's life, if you want to think about it that way._

_Not mine. Never mine._

Harry tilted his head back and drained most of the glass at a gulp. At least the wine was indeed as sweet as the witch had promised him it was.

* * *

Draco had spent most of the time since he'd returned home wandering around the Manor, frowning into odd corners. It had taken him hours to realize what he was searching for.

_Scorpius. Life. Noise._

But Scorpius was with his parents, as agreed, for the next few weeks, so that Draco could be left free to hunt down Ethan Starfall. Not that his parents knew that, either. They only knew that Draco was focusing on something other than Scorpius and getting out of the Manor, and they were too relieved—or wise—to ask further questions.

Draco whirled and strode for the history library. What Moonstar had said about the false names people often adopted was burning in his mind. Maybe he could find something that resembled "Ethan Starfall" or an anagram of it among the genealogies his ancestors had collected.

This particular library had white shelves full of books that sparkled with silver and gilt on the spines, and windows that shed soft light on the chairs and the mantel there. Draco walked past the comfortable chairs and the ladder that could have brought him closer to the high shelves. He felt like doing everything by magic today. He held up his wand and muttered, "_Accio _genealogical books."

The shelf right above his head jumped, and then a huge cascade of books came down. Draco jumped hastily back, cast a spell to shield his head, and then started arranging the books. Most of them were old, but bound in thick leather, reinforced by charms, that would have prevented them taking any harm when they landed.

He looked first in the books that held the pure-blood names, of both living and dead families, beginning with S. It was true that Ethan had said he wasn't a pure-blood, and that Starfall wasn't a family name Draco was familiar with. It was also true that basted children sometimes despised their birth families with a passion, and that even some pure-blood names had died out and wouldn't have been part of Draco's regular education.

There had been a Starmirror family, cousins of the Blacks. There had been a Stargrass, but that had lasted just three generations, before the only child born to the family had been a Squib and the parents had exiled her to hide their disgrace. There were Starborns and Stargraces and Starmoons, which made Draco linger for a moment, as he wondered what references a certain warlock might be hiding with his name. Then he shook his head impatiently and passed on.

No Starfall. Not so much as a rumor or a trace or a breath of one. Draco sat back, frowning. Ethan's name must be real, then. Either that, or it had been a lie from the beginning and there was so such thing as a wizarding family named Starfall.

Draco searched a few other books, but desultorily. No, nothing there.

Well, none of the books were recent. If a Muggleborn family had been started in the past generation or two, the books wouldn't have recorded it.

But there was a place that would have, even if that family, too, had been only a brief flourishing. And the same place kept records of emigrations out of the wizarding world, and petitions for entrance or re-entrance into Britain's wizarding community, and marriages. Ethan's marriage and wife couldn't be a lie. Draco knew that he spoke, at least, from the long experience of raising children. Maybe Draco could find a record of his children if not of the man himself.

He returned the genealogical books to their shelves and went back to his study. He needed to write a letter to the Ministry Records Division, and make it both intriguing enough that he would receive permission to read the records and non-threatening enough that they wouldn't carry his story to the Aurors or the newspapers. Few people visited the Records Division. Most pure-bloods had the stories of the only marriages, deaths, and births that mattered to them on their own shelves or in their heads. Most Muggleborns didn't care. Most historians needed more than the bare facts that the Division stored for their research.

But right now, Draco thought they might be his salvation.

_Ethan. If you're still out there, under whatever name, I'm going to find you. And I'm going to ask you why the fuck you bothered to write to me in the first place._

_And then I'm going to do some other things._


	11. A Desperate Choice

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eleven—A Desperate Choice_

Harry slapped the stack of applications down on Kingsley's desk, and leaned back in his chair with his arms folded. "I expect you to send me better-written essays next time."

"Very good, Harry," said Kingsley, seeming determined to ignore the larger pile of rejected applications in favor of looking at the much smaller pile of trainees Harry had approved to join the class. "You got through these much faster than Auror Weasley did when I appointed him to comb through them."

"You got _Ron _involved?" Harry shuddered a little at the vision of all the different dangers the applications would have encountered in Ron's house, from Rose throwing up on them to being shuffled into and lost among Hermione's legal papers. "I can see why you were so eager for a different Auror to take them up."

"Since you got through them so fast," Kingsley said, still serene, "here's the next lot." And he handed over another pile of parchment that he continued to hold in the air when Harry just sat there with his arms folded, in betrayal, and refused to take them.

"You've got to be _kidding_," said Harry, finally flipping through to one of the essays and staring at the blotted, straggling words in silent horror. "There should be a rule that you at least have to write _legibly_."

"Oh, you can reject any that you can't read," Kingsley informed him, and then waved towards the door of the office. "Off you go. I expect those back in a few days at the latest, based on your record with the first group."

Harry groaned and stood up. He thought about limping from the room, but his leg really was fully-healed, and the last thing he wanted was for Kingsley to think that he needed to keep Harry on desk duty even longer.

He did allow some of his mutters to be audible as he walked out of the office, but Kingsley only laughed.

Because he was so busy juggling the applications, Harry didn't really watch where he was going. Someone told him to, in a voice so icy that Harry instinctively grabbed at all the paper and took a step back.

Draco Malfoy stared at him. Harry felt his insides chill the way they had on the first day that passed without a letter replying to Ethan.

For a second, he thought for sure Malfoy had come to question him about Ethan, and his heart stuttered anxiously to life. If there was a single _chance _that Malfoy had connected Harry to Ethan, then Harry would have to get him alone and use a Memory Charm on him, and that was always risky, especially for someone like Harry who wasn't good at performing them under pressure—

"Out of my way, _Potter_."

Then Harry noticed the frowning woman in the off-white robes of the Ministry Records office waiting down the corridor, and made the connection. Malfoy wasn't here to see him at all. He had come to look into the Records for some obscure reason.

"Sorry, right," Harry said. Ron would have been ashamed of him for responding to Malfoy so abjectly, he knew, but Ron wasn't here, and he didn't know the chaos of thoughts and feelings whirling through Harry's head. Harry just stepped aside and watched in silence as Malfoy sneered at him and walked on after the Records officer.

Malfoy walked as though he had a stick up his arse, but Harry thought he had always done that. More significant was the fact that he glared around more or less impartially, and practically stalked, bending forwards as though the only thing that mattered was getting to the Records division.

_What does he want there?_ Harry thought, shaking his head. He would have believed that all the Malfoys' genealogical records were under the Malfoys' direct control. If they needed to look up some record of a genetic disease or a birth to make sure it wasn't a bastard one—the purposes that brought the people who did come to the Records division there—then they wouldn't have wanted anyone else to know they were doing it.

_Unless he's not looking up things on _Malfoys…

Harry felt the grip of the ice on his chest again. He did walk normally back to his office, and put the pile of applications down on his desk and made sure they wouldn't tip. Then he sank back into his chair, and trembled.

Malfoy would find no Ethan Starfall in the Records Division, of course. But what if he looked up names like Lily and James? What if he was smart enough to research connections between them other than those of siblings?

Once he started down that route, surely it wouldn't take him long to remember Lily and James Potter.

_Stop it, _Harry knew Hermione would say if she could see him now. _You have no idea what he'll find or even what he's here for. It could be something entirely different. And if he does find out, so what? You haven't stolen anything from him or tricked him into doing something illegal. He would have no case against you._

Harry knew that his panic over Ethan _wasn't _rational, any more than writhing about Ethan's life in the first place was. But he had lost his ability to have children, and Ethan's imagined children were what he had instead. It was the reason he'd never told his friends about his journal. Maybe they would have understood eventually, but the flash of pity in their eyes when he first talked about it would have been intolerable. And God knew what Ginny's expression would have been when _she _heard.

The knowledge of Ethan in Malfoy's hands could hurt him more than that. At least none of his friends would actually go to the papers.

Harry bowed his head and clutched his hair with two hands. Right now, he would get nowhere by sitting there and letting his brain whirl along without any checks on it. It would only panic him. He had to think about this the way he would an Auror case, and come up with strategies that would let him tackle it.

What knowledge had he had given Malfoy about Ethan? The names of his imaginary children, his imaginary wife, his imaginary family. The information that Ethan didn't care for the pure-blood ways and hadn't fought in the war. Sympathy for both Malfoy and Scorpius.

Except for the fact that Ethan wasn't pure-blood, and maybe the names of James and Lily, there was nothing there that Ethan had in common with Harry Potter. Malfoy was probably not going to look in the ranks of prominent war heroes for him. And his wife was imaginary, and Malfoy knew well enough that _Harry Potter _wasn't sympathetic to him.

Harry's breathing slowed. All right, he could do this. He didn't think Malfoy would come close to him, and if he did, then he had a plan to handle it. All he had to do was deny that he was Ethan Starfall. It wasn't like Malfoy could break into his house and find the journals and prove him wrong that way.

_All the same, strengthening my wards might not be a bad idea._

* * *

"You haven't found anything?"

Draco started with irritation at the voice of the Ministry Records worker; he had to struggle to remember her name for a moment. Jessamyn, that was it. Jessamyn Honeyglide.

"No," he said abruptly. He didn't care what he looked like. She had seen that he was deep in research, and interrupted him anyway. "I haven't found anything, but I'd like another hour to look, at least." He knew it was hours until the Records Division closed.

That got him a long, careful glance from Honeyglide that he didn't like at all, but she bowed calmly and turned away. Draco cursed and looked back at the books in front of him, but the rhythm was broken. He had thought he was drawing near some knowledge of Starfall. Some pattern to the (undeniably false) name was starting to blossom in front of him, and now—

Nothing.

With a growl, Draco picked up the one piece of paper he had found that contained the name Starfall. Apparently a thief of some renown had been active when Draco was a child. He'd actually walked away with half the Galleons that the Ministry intended to give their employees in broad daylight. He'd finally been caught, but he would only call himself Starfall, and no one else could find out anything else on him.

_Muggleborn, of course. _That fit "Ethan's" presumed background.

Starfall had gone to Azkaban, and died after a few years there. The notes on his case said that was to be expected; he had seemed particularly sensitive to Dementors, and had broken down only when he heard what his sentence would be.

Draco strained again after the elusive thought. Then he glanced down at the parchment that was lying under the Starfall one, and remembered.

One of the apothecaries who had bought stolen Potions ingredients from Starfall was named Ethan Summerfield.

Together, they didn't make much. But Draco knew that he didn't _need _much. He had already determined that there was no wizard named Starfall except that dead thief. Simple search spells that the Records Division apparently used all the time had determined that much.

So. No other person using the alias Starfall. No Muggleborn who had decided to change that to his name so he would sound more wizardly and better able to fit into their society. No forgotten pure-blood family that had lasted only a few generations.

Draco _knew _that the name Starfall was the greatest clue he had, and this was too great to a coincidence, especially since Ethan Summerfield was one of the few people who'd traded with Starfall that they'd been able to catch. The person who had written to him must have known about those people and put their names together. It was like Moonstar had said. The false names that people chose would reveal a great deal about their true origins.

_ But if Starfall had no relatives, what origins would those be?_

Draco shook his head dismissively. Moonstar had harped on the false names concealing real _names_, but Moonstar was something of a fool, in the way that most practicing warlocks were. It didn't mean that the person who had picked this name was related to Starfall, or even Summerfield, although that was a connection Draco would certainly check. It would mean only that it was someone who had access to the trial records, and had probably been intimately involved in the trial from beginning to end.

That meant one thing, to Draco.

_An Auror. _

It would be like an Auror to seek out Draco Malfoy, even when he had done nothing Dark in years, and decide that he needed to humiliate the Malfoy family for the good of wizarding society. Draco didn't know exactly how the Auror would _justify _that, but he didn't know how the Aurors had ever justified the raids they made on his house, either. They would find some way. Whoever this was had probably still got Draco's letter by chance, but what a chance for vengeance it was.

Draco was convinced of his theory. Everything fit. Everything made sense.

He didn't know how soon he would be able to repeat his trip to the Records Division, however, and it sounded as though they were already getting impatient with him. So he decided to look up the other names he had. Anne was perhaps too common to reveal much, and so was James—as both a first and last name—and there were far too many children named Albus in the wake of the war to count.

But…

"_Expleo Lily_."

For a second, books and papers ruffled across the room, and then they came flying towards him. Draco raised the modified Shield Charm that Honeyglide had taught him, and they stopped short of hitting him. They settled obediently onto the edge of the desk, and Draco leaned forwards, panting a little with the thrill of the hunt.

Yes. As he'd thought. There were few witches named Lily, and the references were small enough to be manageable.

He began to thumb through the books, quickly looking through and discarding the references to witches named Lily (and the occasional family with Lily as part of their name) that he knew were related to him. Those generations of Blacks, Malfoy's, even one Weasley, had been dead for years. In the more recent books, he began to slow down and spend more time looking.

There was still a small mountain of references to sort through, though, mostly in newspapers. Draco frowned, curious, and turned one over.

His breath caught in his throat, and he leaned over to look at the photograph of Lily Potter staring up at him from a belated birth announcement. The paper hadn't reported on the birth of Harry Potter at the time he was actually born, the story explained, because his parents were living in hiding. But now they were eager to repair the gap and talk all about the parents of their "newest hero."

Draco swallowed and splayed out his hand so he could see just the name, without the picture distracting him. James. And Lily.

_That_ had been the nagging sense of familiarity he had thought of and couldn't name when he was reading Starfall's letters. What were the odds that one person in the wizarding world would have two children named after members of Harry Potter's family?

Draco considered, for a second, whether this expressed some intricate code where the two names interacted with the names of the criminals he'd already discovered. But he discarded the notion almost at once. It seemed likelier that his first theory was correct: "Ethan" was an Auror, with access to the criminal records and with Harry Potter constantly before his eyes, and from that he had constructed his identity.

Draco rose gracefully to his feet and sent the records concerning people named Lily back to their shelves with a flick of his wand.

None of that meant he wouldn't talk to Potter. Potter might know which Auror was crazy enough to do this. And the more information he had on Starfall, the better.

* * *

Harry thought he did very well when Malfoy suddenly appeared in his office doorway. He had no plan more advanced than staring, because he had convinced himself it would be foolish for Malfoy to come to him when he had simply bumped into Harry on his way through the corridors to the Records Division.

_On the other hand, maybe he's come about that. Careful, now. _Harry laid his hands open on the desk, and tried to make his face as friendly as possible. "Is something wrong?"

"Wrong? No. Not exactly." Malfoy eased into the office, looking around as if searching for the contamination of Ron's presence. Harry found it an effort to maintain his friendly mask. In person, Malfoy was a lot different from the desperate father who had written to Harry begging for help. "I want to know what you know about someone using the names of your parents as false names. And what you know about Starfall and Ethan Summerfield."

Harry blinked and shook his head. Again, he was proud of himself. "Using the names of my parents as false names? Have there been crimes committed in the names of James and Lily Potter?" He wouldn't touch the names Starfall or Ethan Summerfield—not that he knew who that was—unless he had no choice.

Malfoy snapped his head around, glaring. "Of _course _you would assume that I was involved in a crime," he muttered, sounding disgusted. "Of _course_."

"You mentioned false names," said Harry, and shoved his chair back from his desk in case he needed to move quickly. "I assumed you were talking about crime because it's natural to do so. What are you muttering about?"

Malfoy stood straight. "Someone has been writing to me, calling himself Ethan Starfall," he said crisply. "He lied to me, and nearly tricked me into doing something that I might have regretted for the rest of my life. He said that he had children named James and Lily. It seems rather a coincidence to me that someone would pick both those names accidentally. Do you know who this is?"

Such a swirl of thoughts conflicted and collided in Harry that he thought he might blurt something out he didn't mean to.

_I never tried to trick you. Arse. I should have known better than to try and help you, should have known you wouldn't change and you would always take someone trying to help you in the worst light possible._

_Who's Starfall? He found someone named Starfall? Did I condemn them to suffering from him?_

_I shouldn't have used the names James and Lily for my children, either. What a fool I was._

Harry banished the last thought—they were the names of Ethan's children, and not his—subdued the impulse to speak the first one, and found an acceptable way of voicing the second. "I don't know the name Ethan Starfall. You mentioned that he was connected to Ethan Summerfield? I might be able to research that and find out who he is."

Malfoy made an impatient gesture and leaned forwards to put his hands on Harry's desk. "I already did the research for you. One of _your _trial records says that Starfall is a thief who died in Azkaban, and Ethan Summerfield is one of the people who bought his stolen goods. You can't tell me that that's a coincidence."

Harry shook his head. "That case was before my time. You should talk to one of the Aurors who investigated it and see what they say."

"I came to you in the first place because they were also using the names of your _parents. _I thought you would be more interested in that." Malfoy spoke as slowly as though Harry was an idiot.

_Well, maybe I am, to think that there was any way I could have helped _him.

Harry simply bit his lip and waved a hand that he hoped made him seem a little curious—not enough for Malfoy to pursue. "It's strange. But you haven't uncovered any evidence of a plot striking at me, right?"

Malfoy tensed as though he was going to spring like a cat. "You're selfish enough to make everything about yourself," he whispered. "I just clearly told you that this was a plot directed at _me_."

Harry wanted to whang his head against the edge of the desk. Yes, it really had been a mistake for them to get involved with each other.

"I have no idea who it is." Harry sighed. "I have no idea why someone would want to use the names of my parents as the names of false children, and I have no idea what it would accomplish, anyway. You say these names were used in private correspondence to you?"

Malfoy nodded, still tense and deadly motionless other than the small movement of his head.

"Then that makes it even stranger," Harry said. "This person isn't marching through the street proclaiming that they tricked you." _As if Ethan would._ "They aren't trying to hunt you down. Why would they think that using private letters was a means to damage you at all?"

"He lied to me," Malfoy repeated. "He nearly tricked me into doing something I regretted." He was watching Harry as if he assumed that those words were unfamiliar to him.

Harry folded his arms. "What was the thing? What were the lies? Maybe I could help you more if I knew that."

Malfoy snapped himself upright. Harry had seen a dragon do that right before it breathed fire, once. "I don't want to tell you that."

"Fine," said Harry. With an effort, he made his voice not snap. "But it's going to be hard to tell what's going on with this person using the names of my parents, I'll tell you that. They're doing it in private correspondence with you, someone I haven't talked to since the war, and you won't even tell me what the bloody goal was."

"Is," said Malfoy, and his face looked like a skull. "I have reason to think that they're trying to trick me still, and this is an ongoing struggle, the outcome of which is still in doubt."

_Does he listen to himself? _But given that Malfoy had spoken all that load of bollocks with a straight face, Harry decided the answer was probably "no."

"Fine," Harry repeated. "If you don't want to give me more details, then I can't help you. That's how Aurors investigate, is use of details," he added, when Malfoy looked at him as if he was going to explode. "I can't do that in the absence of them. Good day. I hope you find out who's doing this to you."

_And strangely, _Harry thought as he faced his desk again, _that part's even sincere. I know who's doing it to him. His own strange and paranoid brain._

He hadn't realized how caught up in his delusions Malfoy was. He had thought Malfoy probably sat alone in his house all day, brooding on pure-blood traditions and the right way to raise his son, but he hadn't realized before now that that kind of brooding would, of course, drive a person insane.

"I thought you would care more, Potter." Malfoy's voice sounded like gurgling in the back of his throat.

"You've undermined my ability to care," Harry replied, still not looking up from the report in front of him. "I don't see how this thing or person is a danger to me. I wish you luck in finding him and getting rid of the fear. That's all I can really say."

Malfoy slammed the door on his way out of the office. Harry shook his head. He could imagine lots of ways that things could be worse, which hadn't been true when Malfoy had first shown up. Ron could have been there. Malfoy could have leaped immediately to the conclusion that Ethan was Harry because no one else would have reason to use those names.

Harry could have gone on writing to Malfoy as Ethan, convinced that he could help him, and not knowing that he was speaking into the ears of a madman.

_Maybe I ought to tell the Mind-Healers about him, _Harry thought idly. But it stayed an idle thought. Malfoy could probably be perfectly sane in front of other people, except when he was rabbiting on about Ethan, or he would have been locked up before now.

_Not my problem._

Harry felt light, cleansed. Maybe now, he could reclaim Ethan's voice, and start writing in his journal as him again. He didn't have the weight of or responsibility for Malfoy hanging on his shoulders anymore. He still felt sorry for Scorpius, but he had no legal right to intervene and take the child away. Maybe the best he could do was a cryptic letter to Malfoy's parents, warning them to watch out for their grandson. They probably would anyway.

_Yes, I'm well out of that._

* * *

Draco leaned against the wall of the corridor outside Potter's office, his breath coming in quick pants and his eyes stinging. No one passed by, and so Draco didn't have to dash the threatening tears away or straighten up or any of that nonsense.

_Potter knows something. He must. The way he looked away from me and got angry when I wouldn't tell him the details was too suspicious._

Draco straightened. He would find some way to get the details. Not all _three _of the warlocks he had met needed to focus on Ethan, surely? He could send one of them after Potter and get the details that way.

He went home, meditating on whether to choose Velvetmask or Shadowskill for that particular offer, only to find a letter from Moonstar waiting for him on his desk. He picked it up with shaking hands and turned it over.

_I hate Ethan. I hate him for reducing me to this. If this obsession is gone, if I just know…then maybe I can go back to my normal life and being a good dad to Scorpius._

He tore open the letter.


	12. May It Burn

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twelve—May It Burn_

Draco sat staring into the fire. Now and then, he reached out for Moonstar's letter and lifted it back to his eyes, and stared at that instead.

It was nothing except a short explanation of how they had investigated Ethan's letter, and what it had told them about the magical signatures of the people who had touched it. Based on the strength of those signatures and one of the Dark rituals that warlocks used and most other people didn't, they could come up with names.

And then, below the explanation, were the names.

There was Draco's name. The name of someone who Moonstar had confirmed was merely the wizard who sold parchment in Diagon Alley. And then, beneath that…

_Harry Potter._

Draco looked back into the fire. He could feel the slow, mechanical turns of his neck ticking along, contrasting with the flames in the back of his mind. The flames wanted to spring out and burn everything.

But Draco hadn't yet decided what the best way for them to do that was. Burn in the back of his mind until he had succeeded in subduing them somewhat, and then he could unleash them against Potter? Or should he send Moonstar and his fellows after Harry Potter? Draco had no doubt that Moonstar would be willing to do that, if Draco made the fee high enough. And perhaps mad warlocks were better suited to handle a mad Auror.

Potter had to be mad. Why else would he have written to him as Ethan Starfall when Draco had done nothing to him since the war?

_I should have known when I saw the names he chose for his children._

But Draco had still believed that Ethan _had _children, and didn't have war experience, that the names were the only fake things he had put in his letter. He had never believed that Ethan didn't exist, only that he didn't exist the way he had been presented on paper to Draco.

And in a way, he was right. _Someone _had to use the quill and ink. That someone was Potter.

Draco stood. He could feel his hand trembling, and he knew he was probably going to fling the drink he held. He had managed to sit there sipping so far and not do that, but he knew himself. He knew the fire, the signs that he was going to explode. It hadn't happened in a long time, but it was going to happen now.

And there was really only one solution for the flames that burned in the back of his mind. That solution was to let them burn themselves. He might have been content to send Moonstar and the rest to punish Potter if he was someone else. But this was _personal_. It had to be, for Potter to make up such elaborate lies about children and a wife and the rest.

_Did he send me bad advice on purpose? What if the advice only worked by coincidence, or because of the way I applied it? What if he intended to ruin my son, or my relationship with my son?_

Draco's hands sank into the arms of his chair. Oh, yes, he wanted answers almost more than he wanted Potter to pay. And he would be sure to ask him those things, before he attacked him.

Then he paused again, and there was a new color among the flames in his mind, cold-looking blue. But blue fire was among the hottest flames of all, and it could change and damage quite a bit.

_The times that I fought against Potter in the past, I lost. Even if I come in with surprise on my side, I might not win._

That decided, Draco reached for a quill and began to write the letter to Moonstar after all. Moonstar would know both the best place to attack Potter and the best method of getting away with it.

And if Draco had to give up more than bloodraven to secure the services of the warlocks, he would. Where Malfoy honor was at stake, no price could be too high.

* * *

Harry grimaced at the silence of the Ministry around him as the lift slowly rose from the Department of Mysteries. He had known it was late, but the silence told him so in an unpleasant way. He'd been supposed to have dinner with Ron and Hermione, and although the summons from the Unspeakables had come in time for him to firecall Ron and warn him that he was likely to be late, he doubted the food was even edible now. He hoped they'd gone ahead and eaten without him.

He walked out of the lift and hastily towards the entrance from the Ministry. Some of the time, he would Floo, but Ron and Hermione's Floo network connection was having problems and still hadn't been repaired. Faster just to Apparate.

He came out of the entrance into the small alley that shielded it from prying Muggle eyes, and took one step forwards.

The Net Curse sprang around him, fluttering down with rocks attached to the meshes that would bind him to the ground, but Harry was already moving, Auror instinct spurring him into a roll, and he came up with all his instincts screaming at him and his wand in his hand.

Three dark shapes emerged out of the alley.

Harry breathed out a soft curse as the Suggestion Charm on his mind flicked and feathered apart at the same time. Ron and Hermione's Floo connection wasn't having a problem. Someone had put that idea into his mind to ensure that he would come out here tonight and pose an easier target for attackers.

He had to admire their planning, if not the fact that he was its victim.

_They probably cast the Suggestion Charm on me in the Department of Mysteries, _he thought, as he rolled to his feet and raised a shield. _I wouldn't notice one more cloaked figure down there—_

Then he had to shove such thoughts firmly out of his mind, if he was going to _survive_.

There were already illusions springing to life out of the corner of his eye, illusions that were bursts of color and bursts of sound, meant to distract him and hold him down, make him focus on those instead of his attackers. Harry impatiently raised the Blinder Charm. It would dismiss from his attention anything with them in the alley that didn't have a physical body.

The warlocks in front of him paused. They seemed to have really expected their illusions to work, which was stupid of them. They came in more slowly this time, and Harry took the chance to raise even more shields around himself.

The lead warlock stopped a few meters from Harry and nodded as though in respect to a strong opponent. "We weren't instructed to kill you," he called. "You might as well surrender and spare yourself a little pain. You can't strike at us from within those shields, anyway."

_Instructed? _Harry knew some warlocks worked as mercenaries for hire, or what essentially amounted to the same thing; they would collect information or beat people up if the payment was high enough. Most of the time, though, they were as likely to betray their employers as to carry through on their contracts. They wanted valuable information or magic the employers had more than they wanted to inflict pain.

But the warlock's comment revealed more interesting things than just that they were working for someone else. They didn't seem all that experienced in the ways of battle.

With a non-verbal curse, Harry burst his shields and turned them into razor-sharp, flying fragment weapons. One of the warlocks behind the lead one went down with a cry, scratching at his face. Harry hoped he'd got one right in the eyes.

The other two managed to dodge, and grimly raised their weapons. They knew the contest was serious, now. They would be less inclined to give or receive mercy. And warlocks sometimes knew Dark spells that not many people had studied.

_But they don't often engage with a fully-trained Auror, either, _Harry thought, and went grimly into combat.

* * *

Draco, standing under a Disillusionment Charm in the side of the alley, and behind a bubble shield that would protect him from flying weapons, found himself frozen to the spot as he watched Potter take on Moonstar and Velvetmask. Shadowskill lay motionless on the ground. Draco had intended to look and see if he was dead or alive, because surely Moonstar would charge him more if he was dead.

But he couldn't take his eyes from Potter.

Potter was the center of a whirling, flying barrage of spells. He never held _still _long enough for Moonstar or Velvetmask to take good aim. Instead, he danced and turned, and ribbons of fire and fingers of ice and gusts of wind snapped out from him, aiming at limbs to break them, wands to snap them, robes to scatter them and trip up the warlocks.

Already, Velvetmask had tripped twice, and there was blood flowing from what looked like a broken nose as well as a shallow cut above his eyes. Moonstar had been more cautious or better or luckier, but he did have a limp. He could match Potter whirl for whirl, though, and he had spells that quenched the fire or melted the ice or blocked the wind.

It hadn't escaped Draco's notice, however, that he was fighting entirely on the defensive.

_So much for the great warlocks I hired, _Draco thought in scorn, and touched his own wand. What had been unthinkable before might become necessary now. He might need to go into battle on his own against Potter.

The flames in the back of his mind sprang up and began burning eagerly at the thought.

There was a snap and a shriek. Potter had used another gust of wind to fling Velvetmask back into a wall, and had broken his arm, and then Summoned his wand away from him when he tried to retaliate. There could be no doubt that Velvetmask was out of the fight.

Moonstar immediately turned his back on his own fellow warlock and raised his wand against Potter. There was a long stream of something coming out of the wand, something that wavered back and forth. Draco had no idea what it was, and no time to wait. Potter was watching Moonstar carefully, searching for some sign that the spell was about to strike. It was probably a serious one.

Draco broke from his concealment, charging forwards, and launched the hardest curse he could think of, the Blasting Curse, right at the middle of Potter's back.

Potter, _damn him, _dropped to his knees and let his head fall back. The curse sped above him and smashed into Moonstar. His wavering yellow spell seemed to take the brunt of some of it, but it was still enough to stagger him back and spin him around.

Potter leaped to his feet and whirled to face Draco.

He seemed to pause for a moment, perhaps fooled by the way that the Disillusionment Charm blended in with its surroundings, and this time Draco tried a spell that would turn the stone beneath Potter's feet to ice and make him slide. Potter countered it with a charm that Draco had never heard before; he only knew it was the countercharm because he could feel the magic seize hold of his and throw it backwards, and the ground remained cobblestones and not ice. Then Potter charged.

Draco tried to skip out of the way. The alley was too narrow. Potter's shoulder caught him in the gut and hurled him to the ground. Draco writhed there, trying to get his breath, while Potter dropped to a neat kneel on his chest and cast a _Finite _on the Disillusionment Charm.

"Malfoy?" Potter whispered the word in what sounded like disbelief.

Draco opened his eyes to glare at him, and saw Moonstar looming beyond Potter's shoulder. He tried to keep his face perfectly still, so that Moonstar could strike.

He wasn't successful, or Potter was too well-trained. He spun on the spot, making Draco grunt as his knees pressed into all sorts of delicate places. Potter's wand snapped out, and not even Moonstar could evade a Stunner that close. His eyes crossed, and he fell.

Draco tried to get his breath and gasp in outrage, but Potter spun back around, and now he was kneeling in place, his wand resting above Draco's pulse and his expression still bewildered.

"What the _fuck _are you doing?" Potter breathed.

"I know you're Ethan Starfall."

Draco swung the words without thinking about them, as a blunt tool, and had the satisfaction of seeing Potter's face pale as he swayed in place. Draco tried to rise against him, to push him off. Potter looked weaker now than he had since he'd first attacked Draco. Draco knew exactly where his wand was, and how to take it.

But Potter slammed his shoulders back into the stone, and there was a terrifying wildness in his face now that made Draco cower instinctively. He was furious and ashamed a moment later, but the time when he could have pretended not to be afraid was past.

"What do _you_ know?" Potter gave him a single contemptuous look, his eyes so furious that Draco held still just from that. "You have no idea what I've said—what I sacrificed—"

"I know that you don't have a wife and children," Draco said, determined to salvage something out of this. He obviously wasn't going to get to hold Potter helpless and make him listen to Draco like he'd planned, but he could inflict mental pain for some of the like pain that Potter had inflicted on him. "I know that you don't have any experience raising children. I know that you wrote to me under false pretenses, and that's worse than a false _name_. Do you have any idea how could you have harmed Scorpius? Do you have any idea how you could have harmed _me_?"

Potter stared at him, and then laughed, once. The sound was as wild as his eyes. "You sit there and pretend to be rational? _You _were the one who hired three warlocks to attack me in a darkened alley!"

_That didn't work out the way I hoped. _But now anger was rising to drive back Draco's fear, and he at least had an answer for that. "I wanted you to pay. I refuse to be the butt of your joke—"

"Is that what you think it was?" Abruptly, Potter let him go.

Draco didn't try to stand up. He had taken a pretty hard fall, and he didn't know if Potter, who was obviously mental, would change his mind and lunge at him in a second.

But Potter didn't seem interested in doing that. Instead, he stood up and paced back and forth, shaking his head and swearing to himself.

Draco propped himself up on one elbow and stared. He didn't know what was going on. He wondered if anyone did, or if he could have walked around the world and found nothing except people who would agree that Potter was mental.

Potter abruptly turned back towards him and gave a complicated motion that seemed to involve not only his arms but the rest of his body. "It wasn't a joke," he said. "It was a misguided attempt to _help _you. I see now that I shouldn't have bothered. You're still the same self-centered berk that you always were. The minute you found something you didn't like in what I'd wrote, you dedicated yourself to revenge, didn't you?" Potter's voice was low and passionate, his arms folded as if he was cold. "You're the same you always were, and I feel sorry for your son. That's all."

He turned his back. Draco waited to see what kind of curse he would come up with next; if there was anyone who would know the kinds of curses that could be fired over your shoulder without looking back at your enemy, it was Potter.

But he kept walking, waving his wand over the stunned warlocks that Draco had hired, and the truth hit Draco like a broken wall. Potter was walking away. He would leave Draco here, and he expected Draco not to strike back. To _accept it_.

Rage like nothing Draco had known, hot and dark as rushing poison, welled up in him.

_He thinks I'm a venomous serpent and no good, does he? He ought to know that a snake strikes again and again until you kill it._

More silently than he had done anything in his life, Draco rose to his feet. His stomach and head still hurt, but the rage was giving him strength now, pouring through him like a painkilling potion.

When he was in the right position, he lunged and grabbed his wand from the ground, and then he was going straight at Potter's back in a long rush, beautiful and free, as hard as the stones beneath him.

And he aimed his curse at the base of Potter's spine, and his rage made him choose the right one. "_Frango dorsum!_"

* * *

Harry was swimming in confusion and misery, so much emotion filling him that he felt ill. This wasn't ever the way that he would have chosen to have Malfoy find out the truth, if he was going to find out at all. Obviously, since Malfoy was insane, Harry would have preferred that he didn't find out, but there were good ways and bad ways.

_I hurt him. And yeah, some of it wasn't my fault, because he would have taken it badly no matter what, but I could have passed the letter on to someone else. I chose to interfere. I chose to approach him._

Then he heard the Back-Breaking Curse flying at him.

Lightning consumed his sympathy, his weariness, his uncertainty. This was battle, and that was an enemy. He dropped to his knees and let the curse fly over him and detonate harmlessly against the opposite wall. Then he stood and turned.

Malfoy was in the middle of the alley with a faint frown on his face and nowhere to hide.

"_Aranea_," said Harry, flipping his wand up and spinning out a curse he would never normally use, his mind running on wildness, on battle instinct, not thinking at all.

Malfoy flew backwards, the wand ripped from his hand, dangling in thick, sticky strands of spiders' web against the alley wall. Harry stalked after him. Malfoy's wand had dropped next to the wall, beneath the lowest strand of the web. Harry gave it an indifferent glance, considered stepping on it, and then looked away. He didn't need to be that petty.

Instead, he leaned in until his nose was an inch away from Malfoy's, nearly becoming stuck in the web himself.

"Do you know what could have happened tonight?" he whispered. "The warlocks you _chose _could have killed me. You could have hurt me. You could have committed murder, and for nothing but your stupid _pride_. You could have paralyzed me with that curse. Is that worth it, Malfoy, for the sake of your pride? Your stubbornness? Your idiocy?"

Malfoy blinked a few times, and then even that stopped, as the web gripped his eyelids. Harry laughed harshly, watching Malfoy twitch. He wanted to flinch away, probably now more than ever that he could no longer see Harry clearly. Harry wouldn't let him.

"How does it feel to be helpless, then?" Harry asked. "The way you were trying to make me? This isn't about your son or even about your indignation that I tricked you. This is pure and simple _rage_." He lifted his wand and touched it as near to Malfoy's right ear as he could without actually touching the web. "Addicting, isn't it? It makes you feel like you're the one on the top of the world and everyone else should be begging _your _permission. Doesn't it?"

Malfoy, of course, said nothing. His mouth was held partially open; the web was stuck to his tongue. Harry pulled back, to the place where he judged those caught and slit eyes would probably see him the best.

"You have no idea what you almost did," Harry said. "Even if you believed it was a prank, you were going to _murder _me." He discovered he was shaking, the way he hadn't once done in his battle with the warlocks. "What the _fuck _is wrong with you? What the _fuck_? Being taunted—even if I didn't mean to do that—is worth killing to you now, when nothing used to be worth that?"

Malfoy gave a muffled kick. Maybe a muffled scream, too.

"If you'd ended my life," Harry said softly, "it would have been the end of your life, too. Did you consider that? It wouldn't have been hard to find out who you were. I kept your letters. When they went through my effects, they'd find them, and it wouldn't have been hard to think that you might hate me enough to kill me. Ron would lead that hunt with _particular _vengeance. Then you'd be in Azkaban, and your son would have no father. Did you ever think of that?"

Malfoy started blindly at him, and Harry paused and sighed. "Of course you didn't. Because you didn't think of anything but your anger and the best way to pay me back. That was more important to you than Scorpius."

Malfoy gagged and lashed his feet, but that wound the web around a few parts of his legs it hadn't touched yet, and left him even more a prisoner. Harry snorted at him. His rage had mostly gone, as if it had bled out of him and clung to Malfoy along with the web.

"You're an idiot," said Harry. "I think that you've been acting mental, whether or not you actually _are_. Someone had to tell you that. They haven't, or you haven't listened." He swallowed. "I regret the time I put in trying to help you, but not the time I put in trying to help Scorpius. I hope that I've saved his father for him. I hope so."

He hesitated one more time, but there was no more to say, no more words between them. In the end, he cast the charm that would dissolve the web, but placed a Timer Charm on it, so it would only let the web fade when he was safely away. Then he turned to collect the warlocks.

Malfoy made another muffled sound. Deriding himself for doing it even as he did so, Harry turned around.

Malfoy was staring at him with lowered eyelids and hanging feet. As Harry watched, his throat bobbed, but whether he was going to say something or spit something, Harry didn't know. The web blocked all clear sight of his movements.

Shaking his head, Harry turned and walked the floating warlocks back into the Ministry. He would deal with them and omit mention of Malfoy from the attack, unless someone came out here and found him before the Dissolving Charm worked. For the hurt he had done him, Harry thought, he owed Malfoy that one more chance.

Other than that, no, nothing.

_I hope that he's smart enough to walk away and just let this go. I hope so._


	13. Humiliated in Defeat

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirteen—Humiliated in Defeat_

Draco sat in the warm bath in the center of the biggest bathroom in Malfoy Manor and watched the steam rising past him from half-lidded eyes. He had no intention of opening his eyes any more than that, not for a long time.

The water coiled along his limbs, relaxing them. When Draco bent down and dipped his head under the surface, using his hands to rub rich, sweet-smelling shampoo into his hair, the bruises and other irritations he had received from Potter began to fade.

_You said that you weren't going to think about Potter._

Draco lifted his head again, listening to the tinkle of water from his hair back into the bath before he looked at his arms again. Bruises mottled his arms. There was a large one on his back that he had seen in the full-length mirror on the wall before he sat down. Abrasions covered his skin. Now and then he still drew a wheezing, painful breath from the way Potter had knelt on him, even though he'd taken a Pain-Killing Draught the instant he returned home.

Potter had flung him into walls and grappled with him and used a web on him.

Potter had used a Dissolving Charm that had let Draco go.

Draco sat there, and he thought about Potter, because it was impossible not to. He only reached out and picked up his wand when the bathwater began to cool and he had to make sure that it was still soft and steaming around him.

There was no answer to the dilemma. If Potter was his implacable enemy, he would have brought Draco in to the Aurors and had him arrested for attempted murder—or at least attempted paralysis, the most likely consequence of the Back-Breaking Curse. He wouldn't have cared about subjecting Scorpius's father, as he said he did, to a sojourn in Azkaban Prison.

_He's a liar. You know that you can't trust him. And not because of things that happened years ago or because you can never trust a Gryffindor. You can't trust him because he told you powerful and recent lies._

Draco shuddered and tipped a cupful of water over his head. The cups that his ancestors had made and kept to aid in their bathing were lovely things, made of silver and faceted with small, gleaming embedded emeralds around the lip.

If Potter was his friend, he wouldn't have lied to Draco in the first place. He wouldn't have mistreated him. He wouldn't have made it necessary for Draco to hire warlocks.

Everything was so strained and strange and difficult.

Draco had known what would happen, when he went after Ethan. He would get an explanation. He wanted Ethan's painful torture and possible death, and he especially wanted that after Moonstar had told him that "Ethan" was Potter, but the information had been primary.

He hadn't got one. Potter had walked away with the secret of his strange behavior intact, not something Draco would have wanted to happen under any circumstances.

He could feel that realization pouring through him, tightening his muscles. A few hours ago, he thought it would have made him write back to Moonstar or seek Potter out again.

But he hadn't been thinking.

That was what his parents had been trying to tell him, Draco thought, as he picked up his wand and cast the Warming Charm on the water again. It was what Blaise, in his own way, had been trying to tell him, although being Blaise, he would never come right out and say it. He always had to disguise it with a joke instead.

Draco hadn't been _thinking_. He was just feeling, running around after the next emotion that reared its ugly head. He was concerned about Scorpius, he was infatuated with the idea of Ethan helping him and wanted to meet him, he was full of rage at the way Ethan had manipulated him, he wanted to kill. He had made plans, like the one to manipulate Ethan until he gave up his secrets, but he hadn't followed through on any of them except the ones made on the spur of the moment.

_That is pathetic._

Draco wouldn't have been able to bear that thought, an hour ago, a day ago. He wouldn't have been able to _think _it. It would have been drowned in the cascade of his rage. He acknowledged that now.

He still hated the fact that Potter was the one who had made him slow down enough to think about it, that he owed this space of clear thought, in a way, to Potter. But he was wise enough to acknowledge it.

That was the most pathetic thing of all, that he had prided himself on being so clever and manipulative and wonderful, but he hadn't carried a single one of his plans through. He still didn't know why Potter had done this. And since Potter obviously wanted both of them to walk away from this and never speak again, he wouldn't willingly tell Draco, either.

_I want to know._

Draco felt his fist clenched in the water without knowing how it had got that way. He looked down, and eased it open. Lazy little trails of red curled through the water, and after another second of staring, he understood. He had bloodied his own hand, without realizing it. The force of his own passion had been more important.

_People like you wanted to be—Slytherins, Malfoys, pure-bloods—can feel. But they don't let their emotions dictate their actions. You didn't let your irritation at having to get married stop you from doing it. You didn't let your boredom with Astoria let you end your marriage before Scorpius was born. You don't let your exasperation with your parents drive you away from them forever, because Scorpius needs his grandparents._

Draco knew he had made rational decisions, as recently as the last year. What he didn't know was what had driven him away from them.

Then he flinched, as the picture of the reason appeared in his head, blond and grey-eyed as he was.

_Scorpius._

Draco didn't know how to raise him, didn't know how to cope with a child that couldn't be reasoned with. He knew about pure-blood ways, but none of them applied. He knew about being a good Malfoy, but he wasn't raising one. He knew about Slytherins, but Scorpius wasn't of the age to go to Hogwarts yet.

Everything he wanted to be, everything he was, fell apart in the face of Scorpius's passionate temper tantrums, and Draco responded with nothing but passion of his own. It was all he had left.

He had shut himself away from Theo because he was disgusted at the way Theo ran around. He had neglected his friendship with Blaise because Blaise's humor annoyed him. He had turned his back on the advice his parents would have offered him because he couldn't bear the thought of them criticizing him.

Every one of those decisions hadn't been something an adult would do—at least, not an adult who had the regular company of other adults, and could get some perspective outside the little, closed world of the child. Scorpius might be the center of Draco's universe, but Draco couldn't help him if he was spiraling out of control.

That was exactly what had happened, though.

_This fall was a long time coming._

Draco would still rather anyone than Potter had precipitated his fall. But it had happened, now. He was awake, now.

So, the biggest question was what he was going to do next. Not whether Scorpius would ultimately want to be a Malfoy, or how he would make Potter pay, or whether there was some answer as to why Potter had invented the identity of Ethan Starfall to write to him—although Draco would still like to know why that had happened. What _decisions _he would make.

Not just what he would feel.

Draco Summoned ink and parchment, and began casting the spells that would make the quill write on the parchment of its own accord, hovering above the water so it wouldn't get wet.

This time, he was writing a letter to Theo.

* * *

Harry couldn't sleep.

That was a pretty normal reaction, he thought, after a day when he had been attacked by three warlocks and then had his secret revealed by Malfoy. He'd spent a long time at the Ministry questioning the warlocks, too. But none of them could tell him anything useful about Malfoy. It seemed he'd been smart enough to meet them in a disguise.

_That was the only smart thing he did._

Harry rolled over and punched the pillow. In a few hours, light would be leaking through the windows, and he hadn't really done anything responsible. He hadn't slept, he hadn't thought things through, he hadn't decided what to do about Malfoy.

_There is nothing to do about Malfoy. You gave him one chance, and if he comes after you again, you're justified in responding with everything you've got._

But that wasn't the main problem. Lying there with his lungs laboring again as if he was back in the battle with the warlocks, Harry shut his eyes. His chest hurt.

The peace of his life had been shattered, and he didn't know how he was going to get it back. It wasn't as though he could escape into Ethan's voice without trouble again, not after what he had done with it and what he had done to Malfoy with it.

That was the real problem at the heart of it all, he realized numbly, when another hour had slipped past and his ability to hide from himself was almost gone. He had wanted to escape into another time and place and sort of life when he first realized he was childless and always would be, and Ethan had been a way to do that. But let someone take that away, and he was left almost as helpless and fragile as he had been the day St. Mungo's told him the truth about the curse.

_No wonder I reacted to the news of Ginny's pregnancy the way I did. It took her longer than I thought it would, but she moved on with her life. I haven't._

Harry clenched his hand in the sheets. Sometimes, when he got in this mood after he had seen another Auror killed or injured, picturing the faces of Ethan's children had helped him. Or coming up with another adventure they could have the next day, in the perfect life they lived, with loving parents and grandparents and a life never marred by the war.

But now, he couldn't see them. They wavered like smoke in front of his inner eyes and vanished.

_Maybe I didn't have any right to them in the first place. _

He had thought that before, and he had ignored the thought, because if he didn't have a right to them when he was the one who had created Ethan Starfall, who did? But he wondered now if it was really something else, if he didn't have the right to them because creating them in the first place had been irresponsible.

Certainly writing about them to Malfoy had. If he hadn't used those names, then Malfoy would have found someone else to advise him about Scorpius without being suspicious of that person's real name or motives, and Harry would have remained safe with his secret.

He sat up. Morning was creeping along the walls, and he had solved nothing. He felt no better about things than he had when he had lain down.

Harry buried his face in his hands. He had a meeting in a few hours, to speak with the other Aurors who would join him for a new case. The case concerned the kidnapping of children, and Kingsley had given it to him partially because he knew that Harry worked so hard on cases that involved children. Harry wouldn't be doing any field work, per Kingsley's ban. What he was supposed to do was advise the other Aurors and give them clues about the minds of the kidnappers, if he could.

_You have a job. You have a real life that does affect some people positively, even if it's only your friends and the victims of the cases._

When he thought about it like that, Harry's breathing slowed down. He would just have to concentrate on his job, that was all. It was half of what he had done in the last three years, anyway, using his job as an anchor to reality and as a shield when he might be invited some place where Ginny would be, too.

The other half had been Ethan.

_But that's done now. _Harry couldn't bring himself to burn the journals that contained Ethan's life, but he would lock them up, and keep them away from his friends. They were pathetic, they were private and silly, but he had always acknowledged that. What he couldn't stand was for other people to find out his secret, now.

This was his life, the only one he had. It would be foolish to waste it.

* * *

"I must admit, we were somewhat surprised to hear from you this early, Draco. Your mother seemed convinced that whatever occupied you would keep you away for some time."

Draco's temper boiled again as he stared down into the bowl of steaming soup he had carried with him into the library, so as to give him something to do with his hands while he spoke to his parents. Or his mother. He had been sure that it would be his mother who would answer the fireplace, and they could talk trustfully, the way they usually did.

But instead, it was his father. The man who had already raised the successful Malfoy heir of his generation, and didn't need to worry about it anymore, but could criticize Draco from a position of power.

Draco swallowed, and reminded himself of what happened when he just blurted out his thoughts and did nothing except on emotion. "I've come to ask you to keep Scorpius for a few more weeks."

Lucius's eyes sharpened, and he shifted. He'd already had his arms crossed, or so Draco assumed from the position of his shoulders, but now, Draco could really see them folded. "Why? Does this quest your mother spoke of lead you out of the country?"

"Yeah," said Draco. "It does." Theo was in Vienna right now, on a flying visit to some colleagues of his there, and Draco had arranged to visit him. But he knew he couldn't mention that. His parents knew he didn't speak to Theo anymore. They would want an explanation, and Draco…

Wasn't ready to give it yet.

Lucius was still, watching him. Draco knew this for an old tactic of his father's. Silence touched some people with an irresistible compulsion to fill it. Draco had been one of those people, once upon a time.

Now, he sipped his soup and waited. It was also good to have something to do with his mouth, he thought. He vowed to have food like this with him the next time he firecalled his parents. Yes, in a way it was a weakness, because they would probably guess what he was doing, but on the other hand, what mattered most were his actions and words, not their impressions.

Draco felt dizzy a second later. _When did I start believing that? _

Before he could think too much about it, Lucius surrendered. "Very well. It's true that he is exposed to more of the pleasant side of his heritage here."

Draco leaned forwards, insistent now. "You wanted me to have the Manor so I could expose him to all the beautiful things that you taught me to appreciate." That had certainly been the main reason that his parents had moved out, although Draco thought it also had a lot to do with the memories of the Dark Lord lurking around every corner.

"That is more than true," said Lucius, one of those ambiguous phrases that would leave Draco wondering for hours what his father meant with it. "But we thought that you would explore the beauty of the Manor. You have taught him nothing but duty."

Draco did some more staring that ought to have made his father back down, but, maybe since they were on opposite sides of a fireplace, that was exactly what Lucius didn't do. Finally, Draco had to say it. "That was what _you _taught me, when I was Scorpius's age."

"And I realize now that it was a mistake," said Lucius. "It made you obsessed with living up to a certain set of standards, which did not always help you later."

Draco snarled. His father stared at him. Draco ignored that. Maybe he _was _displaying unusual emotion, odd especially in front of a man that he had tried to keep his difficulties in the last few years concealed from, but he had to say this. "So I'm supposed to suffer and not do as well just because you had this experience that you think is wrong now?"

"I do not understand what you are saying, Draco."

Draco shook his head sharply. "I was trying to model the way I raised Scorpius after the way you raised me, because it was the only model I had. And now you sit there contentedly and tell me that it was all wrong? When were you planning to tell me that? How was I supposed to realize it?"

Lucius didn't look unruffled, but he didn't look as changed and remorseful as Draco had hoped, either. "Lately, whenever we have tried to offer you advice about Scorpius, you have snarled at us and changed the subject. We thought that you wished to be left alone."

Draco closed eyes and lips on the snap that he immediately wanted to give. His father was right, as far as it went, although Draco thought he should have persisted anyway if he saw his grandson suffering.

_I hope that I've saved his father for him. I hope so._

Potter should have had nothing to do with this, but he did have something, and Draco thought acknowledging that to himself and moving on was better than saying it aloud. So he murmured now, "I was—running into trouble raising Scorpius, and I had defined myself as someone who had nothing to do, no more important duty but to raise him."

"It _is _the most important thing you can do."

"Stop misunderstanding me!" Draco glared at his father, and proved to himself and Lucius both that his anger hadn't gone away after all. "I _meant _that you had a life outside me when I was that age. And so did Mother. You had each other. You had your politics, and the alliances that you maintained with other pure-blood families."

"It was your choice to divorce Astoria."

Draco ignored the attempt to distract him from what he was saying. "I had nothing else. That was what led to Scorpius becoming my obsession."

His father looked at him keenly. "Once I would never have thought to hear you use that word. What changed your mind?"

Draco thought of the many things that he couldn't tell his father about—Potter, his rage, the warlocks, how he had flailed around screaming and trying to break Potter's back, and Potter—and then decided that he would need to say something, or his father would never believe him. "A confrontation with a man I'd been relying on for advice. I didn't want to believe some of the things he said. But seeing him face-to-face was a lot more effective than reading his letters."

Perhaps that was the truth, after all. Seeing Potter stare him in the face and tell him to stop acting like a madman was far more effective than reading that admonishment would have been.

_He was right._

Not about everything. Potter's bizarre motives for writing to Draco under a false name and inventing a false family were still suspect. But Draco didn't know if he would ever get an explanation for those, while he _did _have an explanation for how Potter's words had affected him.

Lucius seemed to take that statement into consideration for a much longer, and more insulting, time than Draco had thought he would. Then he nodded and said, "Perhaps you need a journey abroad. We will keep Scorpius."

Which was the simple thing that Draco had been trying to make him agree with in the first place. But nothing was ever simple with his father.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll be in Vienna. An owl should find me without much trouble."

Lucius didn't move, either to shut down the Floo connection or say farewell, which Draco would have expected. Draco finally reached to shut down the connection himself, impatient with the staring contest. Lucius had subjected Draco to enough of those since he became an adult that he'd lost his tolerance for them long ago.

"I hope that your change lasts."

Draco narrowed his eyes. "Excuse me?"

"This change," said Lucius, and gestured between them as though it was a living thing, perhaps fragile, like a flower, that would crumple if touched too heavily. "I don't know if it was the presence of your advisor that brought it on or not, but I encourage you to encourage it."

Then he did shut down the Floo connection, and left Draco with a head and a room full of ringing silence.

_Encourage it._

Well, his visit to Theo was going to encourage getting out of the house and having interests other than his son. But what exactly would keep him from succumbing to the rage and obsession again once he was back home?

The rage was there for the thinking of it, such a long and powerful rush that Draco swayed with it. He still wanted to know why Potter had hidden under the name Ethan Starfall, he thought. That was the main thing he lacked. He could accept Potter's superiority in battle and even the way Potter had humiliated him, but—

_There is a way to find out. Write a letter to him and see what he says. He doesn't have to respond, but he might, for the same reason that he dissolved that web instead of arresting you and bringing you into the Ministry. This was partially his fault, and Gryffindors have really tender consciences._

Draco turned the matter slowly over in his mind. No, it wasn't guaranteed to work. But it had a much higher chance that most of his plans so far. And it was cunning.

The way he had thought he was being. The way he wanted to be.

So Draco wrote the letter, in the midst of the house-elves packing his clothes and several books that he might want on the journey, and sent it off by his eager owl.


End file.
